BEIJING (AP) — The brother of an activist Chinese lawyer who security forces are believed to have taken into custody almost a year ago said Thursday that police told him his brother “went missing” in September.
It’s the first word on the whereabouts of Gao Zhisheng, one of China’s most daring lawyers, who disappeared in February 2009.
Gao’s case has drawn international attention for the unusual length of his disappearance and for his earlier reports of the torture he had faced from Chinese security forces. In a memoir, he described severe beatings, electric shocks to his genitals and cigarettes held to his eyes.
He has been one of China’s best-known activist lawyers, taking on highly sensitive cases involving the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and eventually advocating constitutional reform. When he disappeared, it was presumed police had taken him into custody.
His brother, Gao Zhiyi, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday that he recently traveled to Beijing to find the police officer who took his brother away last year.
“He told me that Gao Zhisheng lost his way and went missing” on Sept. 25, Gao Zhiyi said.
He said his family had no other information. “We still don’t know anything,” he said.
Beijing’s Public Security Bureau asked that questions about Gao be faxed Thursday and then did not immediately respond. It has never responded to past questions about Gao’s disappearance.
“I would say that’s a very worrying statement coming from a public official, someone who works in security,” said Roseann Rife, the deputy program director for Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific office. “It seems to me he’s implying they don’t know where Gao Zhisheng is, which is completely unacceptable, because they detained him.”
The leader of another rights group feared the worst.
“My interpretation is that this probably signals his death, though this is hard to believe without a public statement from the Chinese government,” said an e-mail from Bob Fu, a U.S.-based Christian rights activist who helped Gao’s wife and two children reach the United States after they fled China in early 2009.
After years of constant watch by plainclothes and uniformed police in Beijing, Gao’s wife took their children a month before Gao’s disappearance and made a risky overland escape to Thailand.
Geng He didn’t say goodbye to her husband, who wasn’t at home at the time, but she left him a note, apologizing. She and the children eventually reached the United States.
The New York-based group Human Rights in China said Thursday it could not confirm Gao Zhiyi’s statement and that Geng was not yet ready to comment on her husband’s case.
Gao was nominated in 2008 for a Nobel Peace Prize along with another Chinese political dissident, Hu Jia, who in April of that year was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison.