Written accounts of a daunting expose of police torture used on Chongqing crime boss Fan Qihang were swiftly deleted from the internet yesterday, and the municipal deputy propaganda chief and a former deputy of the Chongqing People's Congress became the latest arrests as the crackdown continued.
Fan's Beijing lawyer, Zhu Mingyong, released to media on Tuesday evening secretly taped recordings and transcripts of his meetings with Fan in a detention centre, revealing details of different methods of torture repeatedly used on the alleged crime boss for up to six months last year.
Caing.com, which first reported on Zhu's expose, still carried the story on its website yesterday, but most postings of the article on popular forums have been deleted, although the links were still visible in search engines.
Zhu said the post of the expose in his Sohu blog was taken down within one hour on Wednesday evening. 'I have written before on other cases of forced confessions, as well as crackdowns against triads elsewhere, but my articles have never been removed,' he said. 'I don't know what's going on. No one [from the authorities] has approached me yet.'
A journalist close to the operation of one Beijing-based website said authorities in charge of internet censorship had ordered the website to remove the post.
A pet project of rising political star Bo Xilai, who became Communist Party secretary of Chongqing in December 2007, the crackdown has been hailed officially as an unprecedented effort to clean out the municipality's underworld and stem corruption. However, doubts are mounting as to whether extreme and illegal methods were used to secure convictions for political glory.