(Clearwisdom.net)

Ms. Hou Youfang, 49, was a Falun Gong practitioner and a teacher at Xipuo High School in Jinchang City, Gansu province. She graduated from the Department of Physics at Lanzhou University.

She was detained in a detention center in Jinchang city for fifteen days in 2000 after attempting an appeal to end the persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing. She was fined 9,997 Yuan. [Five hundred Yuan is the average monthly income for an urban worker in China.] The police claimed that the money was necessary to cover the expenses of the three policemen who went to Beijing to pick her up. She received 1,000 Yuan back after insisting on her rights. Her husband divorced her because of the huge pressure Jiang's followers applied at that time. The high school no longer allowed her to teach students. Instead, she was assigned to be a cook and to do heavy manual labor, and was only paid 200 Yuan a month. She had to rent a room in the countryside as she did not have a place to live at the school. The officials talked to her and said that she would be paid, assigned an apartment, and restored to her job if she promised not to practice Falun Gong. She would not change her resolute belief in Dafa.

She was taken away by police in August 2002 for distributing truth-clarifying materials to people, and was illegally detained in Group Two, Section 7 of the Pingantai No. 1 Forced Labor Camp of Gansu province. She was beaten hard and forcibly made to give up her belief with the torture of being hung up with her hands cuffed behind her back [with both hands cuffed behind the back, both feet off or only toes touching the ground, one is hung onto a basketball support or house beam by the handcuffs. Both hands and arms will soon lose sensory perception. In addition, both hands will go numb from lack of blood circulation]. When she could not endure the torture any longer she agreed, against her conscience, to sign papers saying that she would give up her belief. However, she reaffirmed her belief later. Then, the police began to torture her relentlessly, forcing her to stand outdoors for a month while denying her sleep indoors. She resolutely refused to write the so-called "Repentance Statement" [In this statement the practitioner is forced to admit remorse for practicing Falun Gong, promises to give up Falun Gong, and never again associate with other practitioners or go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong.] So the police began to beat her cruelly. As a result, her arms and legs were broken. She died on November 29, 2002 because of the torture. It was said that she suffered from internal bleeding. Her rib cage and pelvic cavity were broken as a result of the beating.

In order to cover up the truth, the police department cremated her body without notifying her family members and immediately assigned the killer to another work unit. Hou Youfang's mother still does not know that her daughter died violently at the hands of the police.

Posting date: 2/14/2004
Original article date: 2/14/2004
Category: Eye Witness Accounts
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/1/25/65781.html

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