A 4-year-old Chinese boy was hit by a police car and was placed in police detention for 36 hours, a report says.
The boy, identified only as Xiaoyu, was clipped by a Chinese police van when he was with his mother in Beijing. Police closed in to arrest his mother, Liu Gexin, while she was speaking to people about Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese practice of self-cultivation—a term that refers to transforming the self through moral discipline and mediation.
In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party ordered a Cultural Revolution-style suppression of Falun Gong, known as Falun Dafa, impacting tens of millions of practitioners.
According to a June 15 report from Minghui.org, a clearinghouse for information about the persecution of Falun Gong in China, Xiaoyu, the 4-year-old, suffered “bruises on his face, arm and knee” after getting clipped by the police van.
The mother and son were taken to a police station at 8 p.m. local time earlier this month. It said while his mother was being interrogated, “the little boy was taken to a different room to be questioned.”
The Chinese officials tried to get Xiaoyu to tell them his “parents’ names, occupations, their practice of Falun Gong, and home address,” the Minghui report stated.
Later, the boy’s family got a phone call from police the next night, telling them to pick up the child from a local orphanage, which specifically is used for children of parents imprisoned by Chinese authorities.
They went to the orphanage about an hour later, the report said, but police told them they had “changed their minds.” They didn’t allow the family to pick up Xiaoyu until 8 a.m. on June 5---36 hours after he was detained.
His mother is still being detained for her practice of Falun Gong, Minghui reported.
Researchers have said that Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience have been killed for their organs. At the least, tens of thousands of practitioners have been killed for their organs, says Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, a Washington, D.C.-based medical ethics advocacy group.
The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed a resolution expressing concern on the “persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from nonconsenting prisoners of conscience in the People’s Republic of China.”
“This legislation is an important step in bringing accountability and transparency, to maybe one of the great crimes of the 21st century: the 17-year effort to eliminate [the] Falun Gong practice from China,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a co-sponsor of the resolution, said of its passing. “I strongly believe that the campaign to eradicate Falun Gong will be seen as one of the great horrors.”
“Over the past four years the U.S. Congress has looked into the evidence on forced organ harvesting through previous resolution drafts and hearings, and today has recognized that forced organ harvesting is taking place and needs to stop,” said Dr. Torsten Trey, who is the executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting following the House resolution.
The official Falun Gong press office, the Falun Dafa Information Center, said that millions of practitioners have been detained over the past 17 years.
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