Mr. Yuan Shengjun was born in 1963. He held a bachelor's degree and lived in the family dormitory of the Jiyuan City Electricity Bureau. He had worked as a teacher, an engineer, and an head of the Jiyuan City Materials Bureau. Mr. Yuan started practicing Falun Gong in 1997 and quickly recovered from chronic heart disease and high blood pressure.

In July 1999, the CCP regime led by the formal Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, began persecuting Falun Gong. In November 2000, Mr. Yuan wrote an open letter to Jiang, then general secretary of the Central CCP Committee, in which he explained the truth about Falun Gong. As a result, officials from the Judicial Bureau arrested him. The Jiyuan City “610 Office” sentenced him to three years in prison. They held him at the Jiyuan Detention Center and at the Zhenzhou City Prison and then released him in November 2003. During his incarceration Mr. Yuan was violently beaten, shocked with electric batons, and subjected to force brainwashing. He was also fired from his job after his released.

At 11:30 a.m. on March 30, 2005, Wang Mingli, head of the Jiyuan City National Security Division, and political secretary Wang Guoyou led members of the “610 Office” to break into Mr. Yuan's home and ransack it and arrested him. They sent him to the Jiyuan City Detention Center.

Mr. Yuan went on a hunger strike to protest his detention. On the eighth day, he was sent to the No. 1 People's Hospital in Jiyuan City, where he was force-fed. On April 29, Jiyuan City Police Department officials issued an arrest warrant of his arrest and forbade his family from visiting him.

After six months of detention, they secretly held a trial on September 22, 2005. On October 7, they sentenced Mr. Yuan Shengjun to six years in prison. Since no incriminating evidence was presented at the trial, Mr. Yuan's wife and his mother, who is in her 80s, decided to appeal the ruling.

At approximately 5:30 p.m. on October 25, 2005, Mr. Yuan Shengjun escaped unnoticed from police custody. He was being held at the People's Hospital in Jiyuan City, Henan Province. He escaped after several days on a hunger strike, and ran to the home of a villager in Nantao Village, Chengliu County, Jiyuan City.

The police later located and surrounded him. The police forced officials in Nantao Village to sign a death certificate even while Mr. Yuan was still alive. They dragged him to the crematory and beat him to death on the way.

Mr. Yuan's family demanded an autopsy, but the police refused. The next day the police cremated the body before his family could look at it. Afterwards, they sent many plainclothes police officers to the house of Mr. Yuan's family to take pictures of practitioners who were paying condolences, as the police planned to persecute more practitioners.

type=case,death;location=Jiyuan