Anhui police apologise after arrest of 'rumour maker' outrages net users
China’s crackdown on internet dissidents continues with more bloggers and journalists arrested
In an act that has outraged China’s online community on Thursday, police in central Anhui province detained an internet “rumour-maker” after he said 16 people died in a traffic accident - which officials had claimed only killed 10.
The Sina Weibo post that Yu Heyu published on Tuesday described an accident he had witnessed a day before on a local highway. “Sixteen people died, including babies,” he wrote in the post. “Yet a local Communist Party chief didn’t allow us to take photos of the scene,” he said. Yu also blamed the local government for failing to improve the condition of the road where the fatal accident happened. The accident had occurred after an overloaded truck hit a van.
After Yu’s wife protested her husband’s detention online by posting dozens of messages, local police spoke out publicly on the matter on Thursday.
The inaccuracy in blogger Yu Heyu’s post was “against the truth”, was “false” and purely a“rumour”, argued an official Weibo post published by Anhui’s Suzhou police. This post outraged thousands of bloggers, many of whom said the police were abusing their power.
"I shall never claim 300,000 Chinese were killed by the Japanese in Nanjing Massacre [in 1937], since I wasn't there to count the number of dead," one blogger cynically observed. "And I would apparently be accused of spreading rumours."