Giornalista cinese picchiato in una miniera

Un giornalista cinese è stato ripetutamente malmenato dalle guardie e dai compagni nella miniera dove stava scontando la sentenza di quattro anni di prigione.

A Chinese journalist serving a four-year prison sentence was repeatedly beaten by guards and fellow inmates, with one attack resulting in serious injury while he was doing forced labour in a coal mine, a rights group said on Wednesday. Qi Chonghai smuggled out handwritten accounts of the alleged abuses at the Jinzhuang Prison in Tengzhou city, in the eastern province of Shandong, the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said.

The worst incident was on April 30 when a prison guard confiscated some of Qi’s records of life in the prison and then ordered another inmate to “do away” with him, CHRD quoted the letters as saying. “I was ruthlessly beaten at the bottom of a 130-metre deep mine,” Qi wrote in the letters, which CHRD said were verified by a “person familiar with Qi’s handwriting.””My entire face was mangled and bloody, and I lost consciousness,” Qi said. “Two fellow inmates found me and dragged me out of the mine, narrowly saving my life,” he said, adding that the attack left him unconscious in hospital until May 6. Qi alleged that he was beaten at least six times previously at the prison and “nearly every day” at the detention centre where he was held for more than one year before he was sentenced to four years in prison for “extortion and blackmail” in May 2008. Qi said the charges against him were fabricated by local officials who wanted to take revenge for his investigative journalism as a legal reporter. Police detained him in 2007 after he wrote a report alleging corruption related to the construction of a government office building in Tengzhou. CHRD said authorities had not allowed Qi’s wife to visit him since February. “The physical abuses to which Qi Chonghuai has been subjected are shocking, and clearly violate the Convention against Torture, which China has ratified,” Renee Xia, CHRD’s international director, said in a statement. “Prison guards who implicitly or explicitly condone violence between inmates must be held accountable,” Xia said. CHRD said Qi’s letters also detailed the harsh regime at the prison, where he was forced to work in coal mines for at least 10 hours per day. Qi complained of permanent injuries to his left thumb, knees and waist at the prison, which he said had only one doctor for its 2,800 prisoners. The US-based Lao Gai Foundation, which takes it name from China’s “reform through labour” concept, said forced work at prisons and labour camps remained common. Many products from prison factories were still exported from China via intermediary trading firms, the foundation said. State media carried a rare report of prisoners working at a coal mine in October 2006, when 13 prisoners died in an underground gas explosion in the south-western province of Sichuan.

Fonte: Earth Times, 13 dicembre 2009

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