Lou Aiqing 12.29.2000

LOU Aiqing, female, 34 years old, was an employee of the Bureau for Rural Business and Enterprise of Weifang City. She lived in the residential housing provided by her work place. Her husband Ji Jun was sent to a labor-education camp in October 2000.

At 7:00 p.m. on December 20, 2000 it was reported that LOU Aiqing and XU Bing had died of heart attacks in a Weifang detention center, but when family members tried to take photographs of the wounds on their corpses, police confiscated the film.

XU Bing and LOU Aiqing had been detained several times and dismissed from work for practicing Falun Gong. In October 2000, they were detained again for going to Beijing to ask the government for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong.

Later, both were sentenced to 3 years of forced labor. Upon hearing this, LOU Aiqing had no other choice but to leave home in November. XU Bing also left home in December after being detained by the Kuiwen District "forced-transformation class for Falun Gong practitioners."

About 7:00 p.m. on December 20, 2000, XU and LOU were posting self-stick posters which read, "Falun Dafa Is Righteous," and, "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" in the city of Qingdao, when they were caught by the police and arrested.

The police used all sorts of harsh punishments in an attempt to make them confess their names and addresses, as well as the source of the materials they were posting. Finally, the police got the information on December 22 after severely torturing them. Later, the two were escorted from Qingdao back to Weifang and remained detained in the Kuiwen detention center.

Then, about 5:00 pm on December 25, the detention center called LOU's family saying that she had died 36 hours ago (at about 5:00 a.m. on December 24). The next morning, her family arrived at the funeral chapel, only to discover the place filled with police. They also noticed that heavy makeup had been applied to LOU, and that her body was covered with injuries and wounds.

Other people witnessed the police surrounding LOU's home. It was learned that LOU's family had taken pictures of her body, and the police exerted a huge effort to find the film. The public security police threatened both her family and her employer.

After the police surrounded and threatened her family for several hours, the family had no other choice but to finally give up the film. They forced both families to agree to cremate the bodies immediately. XU's 8-year-old boy and LOU's 11-year-old girl thus lost their mothers.

LOU Aiqing's died on December 29.

Washington Post, BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, VOA and Radio of Free Asia reported the case.