A Chinese citizen journalist, who documented the spread of Covid-19 in Wuhan in early 2020 and was later imprisoned, is close to death in prison, her brother has said according to US news portal Radio Free Asia.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for picking quarrels and provoking trouble by Shanghai’s Pudong District People’s Court late in 2020. She has been eating very little food in a long hunger strike. The woman denied being guilty at her trial, where she appeared in court in a wheelchair.
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«I don’t think she’s going to live much longer,» Zhang’s brother Zhang Ju said via his Twitter account at the weekend. «If she doesn’t make it through the coming winter, I hope the world will remember her as she once was,» he added. Her brother noted that Zhang currently weighs less than 40 kilograms, despite being 1.78 metres tall.
Zhang is part of a group of citizen journalists arrested, jailed, or «disappeared» after they went to the central Chinese city of Wuhan to cover the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Radio Free Asia reports.
Life of Wuhan citizen journalist endangered in China prison, family says
