Chinese Scribe Jailed Over Covid Reports ‘Close to Death’

New Delhi: A citizen journalist jailed for her protection of China’s preliminary response to COVID in Wuhan is close to death after going on a hunger strike. This has prompted renewed calls from rights teams for her immediate release, News18 reported.

Zhang Zhan, 38, a former lawyer, travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the chaos on the pandemic’s epicentre, questioning authorities’ dealing with the outbreak in her smartphone videos.

She was detained in May 2020 and sentenced in December to four years in jail for “selecting quarrels and upsetting bother” — a charge routinely used to suppress dissent.

She is now severely underweight and “may not live for much longer”, her brother Zhang Ju wrote last week on a Twitter account verified by individuals shut to the matter.

Zhang has been on a starvation strike and was force-fed through nasal tubes, her authorised crew, which didn’t have data on her present situation, told AFP earlier this year.