A family of three who are all members of The Church of Almighty God were detained during the “Operation Thunder” in Liaoning’s Dandong city.
As Bitter Winter reported earlier, on June 26-28, a full-scale “Operation Thunder” was implemented in Liaoning Province, resulting in massive arrests of members of The Church of Almighty God, a Chinese Christian new religious movement. Wu Xia’s (pseudonym) family was among the detained.
At approximately 1 p.m. on June 26, four officers from the Jiudao police station in Dandong drove a private car to Wu Xia’s home to set up an ambush nearby. A little after 4 p.m., Wu Xia returned home and was apprehended in the corridor of her house.
Afterward, 30 officers from the Public Security Bureau of the city’s Yuanbao district and the drug enforcement brigade thoroughly searched Wu Xia’s home. They uncovered and confiscated two books on The Church of Almighty God, two laptops, and a bank card with 200,000 RMB on it. Wu Xia, her son, and her husband were taken in separate cars to a local police station.
Each family member was interrogated in separate rooms from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. After the interrogation yielded no results, Wu Xia was escorted to a detention center in Dandong, where she was detained on charges of “using a xie jiao (heterodox teachings), secret society, and superstitious activities to harm society.”
Although Wu Xia and her son have already been released, Wu Xia’s husband is still held in Daqing city, Heilongjiang Province, and the family is unable to obtain any information about him.
According to a government source, the police took strict precautions to prevent the information about the mass arrests from leaking, so that it would not affect similar operations in other locations. The city authorities directly assigned each location’s quota for captures, and the lists of names of targets have been kept secret. When the municipal authorities issued their orders, they also issued standardized requirements for how to interrogate the members of the Church.
Reported by Ling Tian