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SHANGHAI (REUTERS) – A Chinese court on Monday (December 28) handed a four-year jail sentence to a citizen journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak, on the grounds of ” causing fights and causing problems, ”said his lawyer.
Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose first-hand accounts of crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the epicenter of the pandemic than the official narrative.
“I don’t understand. All he did was say a few true words, and for that he received four years,” said Shao Wenxia, Zhang’s mother, who attended the trial with her husband.
Zhang’s lawyer, Ren Quanniu, told Reuters: “We will probably appeal,” adding that the trial in a court in Pudong, a Shanghai shopping center district, ended at 12:30 pm.
“Ms. Zhang believes that she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of expression,” she had said before the trial.
Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been censored, with whistleblowers like doctors warning. State media have attributed the country’s success in controlling the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
The virus has spread around the world, infecting more than 80 million people and killing more than 1.76 million, crippling air travel as nations erected barriers against it that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.
In Shanghai, the police imposed strict security measures outside the court where the trial began seven months after Zhang’s arrest, although some supporters were not intimidated.
A man in a wheelchair, who told Reuters he was coming from central Henan province to show his support for Zhang as a fellow Christian, wrote his name on a poster before police arrived to escort him.
Foreign journalists were denied entry to court “due to the epidemic,” court security officials said.
Zhang, a former lawyer, arrived in Wuhan on February 1 from her home in Shanghai.
His short video clips uploaded to YouTube consist of interviews with residents, commentary, and footage from a crematorium, train stations, hospitals, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Arrested in mid-May, she went on a hunger strike in late June, according to court documents seen by Reuters. Her lawyers told the court that the police tied her hands and force-fed her with a tube. In December, he was suffering from headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, low blood pressure, and a throat infection.
Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail before the trial and to broadcast the trial live were ignored, his lawyer said. Other citizen journalists who had disappeared without explanation included Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.
While there has been no word from Fang, Li reappeared in a YouTube video in April to say that he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken publicly, a friend said.
The United Nations human rights office expressed concern on Monday about Zhang’s four-year prison term and reiterated its call for his release.
“We raised his case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive repression of freedom of expression linked to # COVID19 and we continue to call for his release,” he said in a tweet.
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