BEIJING | Chinese “citizen journalist” Zhang Zhan, jailed after filming the quarantine of Wuhan, the world’s first city to be hit by COVID-19, is near death, her family has warned.
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Ms. Zhang, 38, is on hunger strike after being sentenced at the end of 2020 to four years in prison for “causing public disorder”, a motive frequently invoked in China against political opponents.
In February 2020, this former Shanghai lawyer went to Wuhan, in central China, to report on the situation there a few days after the quarantine of the metropolis of 11 million inhabitants.
His images of patients bedridden in an overcrowded hospital corridor had given a rare glimpse of the sanitary conditions in the city, plagued by the coronavirus.
She is now severely thin and “at risk of not living very long,” her brother, Zhang Ju, warned on Twitter last week. “She may not make it through the winter.”
“It seems that for her there is only God who matters, and the truths in which she believes,” he wrote, adding that he had asked his sister in her letters to “take care of her”.
AFP was unable to get in touch with Zhang Ju, while his mother declined to comment.
One of the journalist’s lawyers, who requested anonymity, told AFP that the family had requested visitation rights at Shanghai Women’s Prison three weeks ago, but had not received a response. .
The lawyers have no information on the current condition of the detainee but had indicated since her conviction that she refused to eat and was force-fed through a nasal catheter.
Contacted by AFP, the prison declined to comment.
On Thursday, Amnesty International called on the Communist regime to release Zhang Zhan immediately “so that she can end her hunger strike and receive the medical treatment she desperately needs.”
“The international community must put pressure on the Chinese regime in order to obtain the immediate release of Zhang Zhan before it is too late”, pleaded for its part Wednesday Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Besides Zhang Zhan, at least three other independent journalists, Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua, have been taken into custody after covering the epidemic crisis in Wuhan.