(Clearwisdom.net) In April 2000, a practitioner from Huangshi City and I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. We were arrested before we even arrived at the Appeals Bureau and taken to the Dongcheng District Detention Center. There I experienced and witnessed how brutally guards employed by the Chinese Communist Party treated Falun Dafa practitioners.

It was still very cold in April that year in Beijing but I saw guards knocking a sixty-year old female practitioner to the ground, drenching her from head to toe with cold water, and forcing her to kneel on the ground in her wet clothes. When she refused to kneel, the guard forced her to sit in the water for over two hours. The practitioner later told us, "Teacher was strengthening me. I felt waves of warmth and did not feel cold at all."

The next morning, the guards took nine of us to a psychiatric hospital, and told a nurse: "They are on a hunger strike. Use tubes to force feed them." I told the nurse that we were not on a hunger strike, and she should not force feed us. The guard then told her that we were psychotics and she should not listen to us. They then tied us to beds, and inserted stiff plastic tubes into our noses. Rather than force-feeding us, they let the tube slip out, and thrust them in again and again. They were trying to force us to renounce Falun Dafa using this form of torture but since we did not waver, they eventually took us back to the Detention Center.

Screams of agony could be heard coming from the cells that lasted from dusk to dawn. The door of our cell opened, and two people dragged in a thirty-year-old practitioner and threw her on the spare bunk bed. She had wet herself and was crying: "They shocked me with electricity for over half an hour. Both my legs have lost sensation and I cannot walk. Others are still over there getting shocked." I felt awful and said to myself: "I cannot let my fellow practitioners down." I suddenly remembered an inspiring story about another practitioner who had survived torture with the help of righteous thoughts and my fellow practitioners were encouraged by this. The practitioner who had just been dragged in sat up, stretched her legs, and soon recovered.

On the third day, the police took us in groups to the psychiatric hospital again, and threatened to electrically shock us. They inserted needles into the Renzhong, Yongquan, and Hegu acupuncture points and applied current through electric leads, causing severe cramps. It will sometimes even tear the muscle and cripple a person. They continued with this form of torture on the fourth and fifth day. Finally, they realized that we would not change our minds about practicing Falun Dafa and said: "We will agree to whatever you guys say (about how to release you), as long as it's not an unconditional release."

More than a hundred and fifty practitioners from all over the country were held in the Dongcheng District Detention Center. Forty of us decided that we would write a letter of appeal to expose the situation in the jail, tell everyone about how the media fabricated the news, sign and mail it.

In late April, I was taken back to Huangshi City. The police took me to the Huangshi First Detention Center. I was shocked as soon as I stepped into the cell. Four of the five practitioners were handcuffed and shackled; three among them were doubly shackled. The police tortured one of the practitioners by grating her wrists against the rusty handcuffs, cutting into her flesh, causing her to bleed and severely bruising her wrists. The practitioner sweated profusely and became all pale, but did not make a sound.