(Minghui.org) While serving a five-year term for practicing Falun Gong, Mr. Wu Haibo was brutally tortured in Sihui Prison in Guangdong Province. The prison is notorious for its use of torture in trying to force practitioners to renounce their faith. His arm was broken, all of his toes were crushed, and he was hospitalized several times due to the injuries.
Mr. Wu of Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province, was arrested on December 2, 2015, for his faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. He was sentenced to five years on June 8, 2016. His appeal was turned down in January 2017.
Regular Beatings and Abuse
To deprive Mr. Wu of sleep, the guards instructed inmates to take turns monitoring him. Whenever Mr. Wu closed his eyes, an inmate hit him with a clothes hanger, poured water with cigarette butts into his mouth, or wiped the toilet with a cotton swab and put it in his mouth. They also refused to allow Mr. Wu to urinate for more than 24 hours at a time or defecate for several days in a row.
Mr. Wu was regularly forced to squat for long periods of time. Any resistance would result in a brutal beating.
Every once in a while, the guards instructed inmates to torture Mr. Wu three or four times a day, for about an hour each time, for many days in a row. The inmates turned household items into torture instruments. They placed the leg of a small stool on one of Mr. Wu’s toes and then sat on the stool or jumped on it. After Mr. Wu’s toe broke and bled, an inmate sprinkled a handful of salt on it. All ten of his toenails were knocked off or became necrotic. The inmates threatened, “(If you do not renounce your faith), we will beat you until you are disabled, then cure you, and beat you to disability again.”
The inmates poured spicy water into Mr. Wu’s nostrils; poured cold water over him when it was freezing cold; hit his fingers, toes, and ankles with plastic sticks; and whipped his body, hands, and feet with a thick sole, leaving him covered in bruises and swellings.
Passing Out from Beating, Stitches in Lips
On the afternoon of March 17, 2017, inmate Chen Guoxiong attempted to persuade Mr. Wu to renounce Falun Gong. Mr. Wu refused to comply and clarified the facts about the persecution. Irritated, Chen stood up and hit Mr. Wu on the head so hard that he passed out, biting his own lips. He was bleeding profusely from his mouth, so inmate Jiang Shuiping, who had a medical background, put pressure on Mr. Wu’s lips and taped them before reporting the incident to the guards.
The guards didn’t bother to ask what had happened, because practitioners are injured every day due to beatings. And no inmates are ever held responsible for injuring practitioners.
Guard Zeng Jianxing eventually took Mr. Wu and several inmates to the prison hospital. Mr. Wu needed three stitches to close the injury to his lips.
Stomped on the Head, Eye Injured
In June 2017, Mr. Wu refused to squat to protest the persecution, so Wu Zhide and other inmates took turns hitting and kicking him. Mr. Wu didn’t fight back. Inmate head Liu Fei kicked Mr. Wu and stomped on his head. When his head hit the ground, his right eye was injured and started to bleed.
Inmate Chen Zhiyong looked at him and said, “Too bad. He needs stitches again.” Walking to the prison hospital, guard Long Feizhi told onlookers that Mr. Wu had injured himself. At the hospital, Long instructed the doctor not to put in much effort treating Mr. Wu.
To prevent other practitioners from seeing Mr. Wu’s injury, the inmates surrounded him as they walked back to the cell. But the bandages on Mr. Wu’s head worried inmate head Liu Fei, so he took them off.
Liu Fei once told Mr. Wu, “In fact we do not want to beat you, deprive you of sleep, or prevent you from using the bathroom. But we have to follow the guards’ instructions. Without their orders, we would not dare touch you. But once they instruct us to torture you, we have to or they won’t reduce our terms.”
Broken Arm
Despite the brutal torture, Mr. Wu still refused to renounce his faith, so the guards retaliated. On November 26, 2017, Liu Fei and two other inmates held Mr. Wu down and hit him with their elbows. Mr. Wu felt a sharp pain in his left forearm. He said, “My arm is broken.” When they stopped and confirmed that it was, all three inmates immediately said, “Not me!” When Mr. Wu asked to see the guards on duty, they replied that they were busy.
Mr. Wu later learned that the guards were watching everything on the surveillance cameras and they knew that his arm was broken. When they told him that they were too busy to check on him, they were in fact discussing how to handle the situation.
Half an hour later, the guards called Mr. Wu and two of the three inmates, Liu Fei and Wu Zhide, to the office. A guard also surnamed Wu said to Mr. Wu, “You deserved to be beaten.” Inmate Wu Zhide then said, “We didn’t beat him. He fell and broke his arm himself.”
Prison doctor Liang Ruicheng was called to the office. He checked Mr. Wu’s arm carefully and first said the arm was broken, but he soon retracted that opinion. The guard surnamed Wu said to Mr. Wu, “You’re fine. You can go back to your cell!”
When Liu Fei got back to the cell, he announced what the guards had instructed: “Let him (Mr. Wu) rest for a few days, and we’ll continue to beat him later.”
Due to Mr. Wu’s repeated requests, guard Wu finally agreed to take him to the hospital, where an X-ray showed that his arm was fractured, but the prison doctor was unable to treat it. On the morning of December 8, Mr. Wu was taken to Sihui City Hospital. He was operated on, and a metal plate was put in his left arm.
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