Saturday 26th April was beautifully sunny. UK Falun Gong practitioners held a parade through central London to commemorate April 25th. During the parade, some practitioners handed out leaflets to passers-by that told them what Falun Gong is and why the Chinese Communist Party is persecuting such a peaceful and beneficial practice.

Teacher Claudia Kolitz and her mother Berta Bürger watched the matinee of the Divine Performing Arts show on April 19th. They both frequently attend the theatre and came to the Prinzregenten Theatre in Munich on Saturday, where the troupe from New York staged the last performance of their European Tour. They had learned about the show through a newspaper article.

In April 2003 the practitioners who were detained in Ward Eight refused to do hard labour. Ms. Ren Shuxian, a practitioner, said, "We are not guilty. We are being persecuted so we won't do any labour." Zhang Xiuli, the captain of the ward, ordered prisoners to hang those practitioners who refused to work in front of the upper berth of a bunk bed. They were left hanging 24 hours a day for more than two weeks. Their feet became horribly swollen.

There was a room in the Luyuan Police Department where police tied practitioners to the tiger bench with ropes and handcuffs. The tiger bench was a long chair made of steel bars that had a back. The police would tie heavy objects to practitioners' ankles when they were on the bench. This form of torture was already very painful, yet the police also tortured practitioners using various other methods while they were confined to the bench. The police would pull their hair while punching their heads or throats; practitioners would be suffocated by having plastic bags placed over their heads; water was poured into their mouths to choke them; their fingers or toes were burned; nails were driven into their fingernails or toe nails; and they were often shocked with electric batons.

On April 7th, 2008, two schoolteachers, Ms. Zhao Fei and Ms. Liu Lihua, both Falun Gong practitioners, were arrested by police. The headmaster of Shigezhuang School reported Ms. Zhao and Ms. Liu to the police for distributing leaflets exposing the persecution to students and telling them the facts about Falun Gong. In 2000, Ms. Zhao Fei and Ms. Liu Lihua went to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Gong. They were arrested. At the police station, they were beaten and left with cuts and bruises all over. Their faces were disfigured and their hands and feet burnt by the shocks of electric batons. The communist party officials even handcuffed them to utility poles and put them on display in public to defame them.

The police arrested 68-year-old Ms. Xu Yufeng on October 15th, 2007. She was detained in the Jizhong Police Station for six months. During that time, she was physically and mentally abused by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This abuse left her spitting up blood many times. She was hospitalized four times due to the abuse, and diagnosed with lung cancer. Again in police custody and secretly tried, her family was not informed. Although she was very weak, the police kept her in handcuffs. Fifteen-thousand yuan was demanded from her family by the CCP members for her release, but the family refused to pay.

A neighbour of ours who is a physician at a hospital in Beijing told us that the military police advised her hospital on April 25 to prepare for an unrevealed emergency. They were told to vacate all hospital wards and prepare a large medical supply for external injuries suffered during an emergency mission. Until the late afternoon of April 25, the Commando car teams of the military police kept Fuyou Street under continued surveillance. Apparently Jiang's rogue regime had planned to suppress our peaceful appeal with guns and violence.

On the surface, the April 25 appeal seemed to be triggered by the Tianjin arrests and an anti-Falun Gong article by He Zuoxiu. The underlying reason stemmed from the central authorities' anxiety about the unprecedented popularity of Falun Gong. Seven years after Mr. Li Hongzhi's first public lecture in 1992, there were about 70 to 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in Mainland China. A full understanding of the incident is very complex, as it had both long term and short term causes, and was related to political struggles inside the Communist Party.

To expose and end the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Falun Gong practitioners in Macao have been persistent in distributing truth-clarification materials on Senado Square and helping people quit the CCP.