A teen daughter was horrified when she noticed a long surgical incision on her late father’s dead body. It was the first time she'd seen his body since his death one month prior while in police custody in China.
Startled by what she witnessed, she began unbuttoning her father’s shirt to track how long the incision was, which possibly extended beyond the area where the heart is located. However, right then, police officers forced her and the family out of the room, an indication to her that the reason for the incision and his death could be even more unethical than her family had ever thought possible.
Every day, the siblings returned home from school only to find no one around in their one-story apartment. The unattended young siblings were suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of household chores and grocery shopping while worrying over how long their limited savings would last.
Han Yu said the misfortunes forced her to “grow up all of a sudden.” Being the elder sister, she shouldered the responsibilities of taking care of her brother and cooking meals; she learned to set up the fire during the cold months so that they wouldn’t freeze.
On July 20, 1999, merely seven years after the peaceful meditation was introduced in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a brutal persecution campaign to eradicate the practice. With an estimated 70 million to 100 million Falun Gong adherents in China alone by that time, the regime perceived Falun Gong’s moral presence as a threat to its authoritarian rule and communist ideologies.
In 2004, Han Yu’s father, Han Junqing, died just two months after he was incarcerated at the Fang-Shan District detention facility near Beijing.
On learning the devastating news, Han Yu was in disbelief, as her father was very healthy when she last saw him. She even thought that the news in itself might be wrong.
The police refused to allow Han Yu and her family to see Junqing’s body. The authorities even conducted an autopsy to find the cause of his death without the consent of the family; the autopsy report said that Junqing had died of a heart attack.
In June 2004, the local security department allowed Han Yu and her family to see Junqing’s body.
Han Yu said the policemen present in the room that day outnumbered the family members. The family was instructed to not carry any camera or let the media know. Additionally, they were thoroughly checked before entering the room.
Looking at her father’s body placed in an empty room, Han Yu noticed that he had lost a lot of weight; his chin and face were covered in bruises, and the area under his left eye had caved in. However, what took Han Yu aback was a long cut “stitched with thick black threads” that led downward from her father’s throat. Startled, Han Yu unbuttoned her dad’s shirt to see how big the incision was.
“I wondered what he had been through before he died,” Han Yu said. “As I got to the second button, the police saw what I was doing, and yelled for me to stop.”
The family were forced out of the room, but they continued to insist and argue with the police for a long time. Han Yu’s uncle and other relatives then went inside the room, and when the police weren’t looking, her uncle opened up Junqing’s shirt buttons, and what he saw was bone-chilling.
After relatives questioned the police about it, they said it was due to the autopsy.
However, it wasn’t until 2007, when she was browsing the internet, that Han Yu found an article online indicating the multi-billion dollar industry of forced organ theft.
“I cried throughout the night until I passed out.”
“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one—and probably the main—source of organ supply,” the tribunal said.
