Like in "Fight Club"...

[serenissima]

I don't try to monitor worldwide human rights situations, it's just that this headline caught my attention.

AP: China says activist broke his own neck

BEIJING - Chinese investigators have concluded that an activist who said he was paralyzed after assailants broke his neck inflicted the injury on himself, his son said Thursday.

"We cannot accept this decision," said Fu Bing, whose father, Fu Xiancai, criticized the government's treatment of people who were forced to relocate as a result of the Three Gorges dam project.

Fu Xiancai was injured three weeks after German public television broadcast an interview in which he said he had been threatened and beaten for complaining about inadequate compensation for relocated residents.

He says that on June 8, he was called into the Zigui County Public Security Bureau in Hubei province and criticized for his television appearance. He was attacked after leaving the police station, he said.
[...]

The New York-based group Human Rights in China [...] said authorities were "unlawfully pressuring Fu Xiancai to forgo any legitimate appeals process and refusing to disclose the experts who determined that Fu could have single-handedly struck himself from behind with such force as to shatter three of his vertebrae."
[...]

Right.

Comments

[breimh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it makes you a bit more apprehensious to read things like this, and see negative goings ons in our own policing and military agencies... at least it does me.

The sad thing is, when my cousin and youngest brother were just little tikes, they would talk about wanting to join the police force and/or be detectives for the FBI; as they got older and heard horror stories of police brutality and racism/fascism within either agency (and a couple of times experienced such issues firsthand), or heard about such happenings from other policing agencies around the world, they changed their minds. They'd been so good, before that, but were suddenly becoming more wreckless and uncaring as to breaking laws, even minor ones like traffic laws.