A believer in Almighty God was detained in May, and her family has not been able to visit her or even get any information on her whereabouts.
As Bitter Winter reported earlier, over 100 members of The Church of Almighty God, a Chinese Christian new religious movement, have been arrested in the city of Chongqing since this April. The whereabouts of 40 detainees remain unknown; seven reported to have been tortured. According to internal sources, the operation was aimed at the upper-level Church leaders who, after their arrests, were confined and interrogated secretly in hotels and nursing homes. We have just received detailed information about one of the arrested whose family is still forbidden to visit her.
At around 6:00 p.m. on May 18, Zhang Hui (pseudonym), was cooking dinner at her home in the Jiulongpo district of Chongqing city, when seven policemen from the local Jiulongpo Public Security Bureau suddenly barged in, handcuffed her without any explanation, and started to search her house. After three hours of ransacking, the officers took away Zhang Hui, confiscating two computers, found during the search, with information about The Church of Almighty God.
In the evening of the next day, Zhang’s husband and daughter went to the police station to see her. The police ordered Zhang’s daughter to sign a notice of detention where the reason for Zhang’s arrest was indicated as “suspected of using xie jiao (heterodox) organization to disrupt the implementation of the law.” They said that they would be transferring Ms. Zhang to a detention center that evening and that the family could not see her.
They returned to the detention center the next day and were notified by the guard at the door that Zhang Hui was not there. Since then, Zhang’s husband and daughter had returned to the center many times but were always refused to see her. The family still does not have any information on her whereabouts and worry that Zhang may be tortured.
The “2021 Annual Report on the Chinese Communist Government’s Persecution of The Church of Almighty God” is rich in statistics— and every number hides a tragedy.