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BEIJING – A Chinese court sentenced a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan, the city where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have started, to four years in jail, her lawyer confirmed.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was one of several citizen journalists whose first-hand accounts of when the virus first appeared nearly a year ago painted a more dire picture of the initial outbreak than the official government narrative.
Zhang, a former lawyer, arrived in Wuhan in early February from her home in Shanghai to document in a series of online posts how the city was coping with the deadly new virus. Some of his posts criticized the Chinese government’s response.
Zhang was arrested in May and charged with spreading false information, granting interviews to foreign media, disrupting social order and attacking the government.
On Monday, she was convicted on charges of “causing fights and causing trouble,” Zhang’s lawyer, Zhang Keke, who is not related to the citizen journalist, told NBC News on Monday. Zhang did not speak or show any reaction to the court decision, his lawyer said, adding that he did not respond when asked if he wanted to appeal his sentence.
Before the sentencing hearing, Zhang said his client went on “a prolonged hunger strike” while in detention and was force-fed.
He said that Zhang suffered from dizziness and headaches, and was “physically frail.”
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“When I met her days ago, they tied her hands around her waist and inserted a nasogastric tube into her nose,” she said, adding that her client did not plead guilty.
“He has a strong will,” Zhang said.
The human rights organization Amnesty International also sounded the alarm about Zhang’s health and the “risk of further torture and other ill-treatment” earlier this month.
China has been accused of covering up the initial outbreak and delaying its response, allowing the virus to spread globally. Beijing has denied all the allegations, saying it acted swiftly to stop the virus, which has now claimed nearly 1.8 million lives worldwide.
Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been heavily censored within the country with silenced whistleblowers and state media praising China’s success in containing the virus. The country’s health officials say they have only recorded 86,976 cases since the pandemic began, while there are more than 80 million cases worldwide.
In the early days of the outbreak, authorities reprimanded several Wuhan doctors for spreading rumors after they tried to alert the public to the new virus. The best known of them, Li Wenliang, later died of Covid-19 and became a national hero.
Several other citizen journalists who reported from Wuhan during the early pandemic also appear to have been targeted.
Fang Bin, who shared videos of Wuhan hospitals on YouTube, has been missing since February. Chen Qiushi, who went missing in February after making a series of social media posts about the outbreak in the city, is under close surveillance and has not spoken publicly, the South China Morning Post reported. Another citizen journalist reporting from Wuhan, Li Zehua, reappeared in a YouTube video in April after disappearing for nearly two months to say he was forcibly quarantined.
Eric Baculinao reported from Beijing, Yuliya Talmazan from London.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Janis Mackey Frayer contributed.
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