RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.
RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.” “Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.
Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus. “One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.
Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive. “He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”
According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.
The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.
“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen.
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| Some in the bodybags were still alive and moving. |
The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.” Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive. The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.
Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city.
Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.
When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.
“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”
Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.
“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”
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| Crematoriums in Wuhan were burning the virus victims, dead & still alive, 24/7 for weeks. |
As families across China remembered the dead on a traditional mourning day, the authorities issued a warning to a prominent lawyer who drew attention to the large numbers of family members lining up to collect their loved ones' ashes in the central province of Hubei.
As the entire nation observed a three-minute silence at 10.00 a.m. on Saturday, the traditional grave-tending festival of Qing Ming, cars, trains and ships sounding horns and air defense alarms sounded out in memory of the dead, both ancestral and those who died more recently in the coronavirus pandemic.
But the tribute came amid ongoing questions over the government's official death toll and officials' early handling of the epidemic after it emerged in Hubei's provincial capital, Wuhan. One social media user surnamed Cai published an article titled "Accountability is the best tribute for the dead."
In it, Cai wrote that mourning those who died after a disaster could bring comfort to the living, but more importantly, should cause people to reflect on the causes of the disaster. "At the moment of national mourning, those responsible should be held to account, whether they be in government or the private sector," the article said.
An Wuhan resident surnamed Ding whose mother recently died of coronavirus said she had been denied hospital treatment because she couldn't get tested, and demanded that somebody be held to account over her death. "I went to the police yesterday to ask about this," Ding said. "Everyone responsible for ... serious consequences should bear criminal liability, not just administrative accountability."
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| Hundreds & hundreds of boxes containing individual ash-urns at funeral homes. |
Meanwhile, mourning relatives said they had discovered anomalous objects in urns that couldn't have been linked to their relatives. A resident of Wuhan's Jiang'an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man's belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother's ashes.
And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father's name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted. Meanwhile, Wuhan's funeral homes have been working round the clock to cremate dead bodies, giving rise to widespread suspicion of the official death toll of around 2,500 dead in the city.
Residents and citizen journalists have been counting urns and figuring out the number of cremations based on the combined capacity of the city's cremation facilities. Most estimates, regardless of how they are arrived at, indicate the cremation of more than 40,000 dead bodies in recent weeks.
A source close to the funeral industry surnamed Ma said some incinerators have stopped working after being run night and day, and that funeral homes are now cremating several bodies together to meet demand.
"In the past, only one body would be cremated at a time, but now they are working 24/7," Ma said, adding that six out of the city's 30 furnaces were now no longer working. This is certainly because they have been burning too many bodies at the same time," he said. "This blocked up the machine and it burned out."
'Screaming sounds'
Ma said reports have emerged of people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving, citing videos circulating online. These included a video that went viral on social media in February in which a woman speaking in a Wuhan dialect of Chinese described seeing a male patient next to her in a city hospital forced into a body bag while his feet and hands were still moving.
"One old lady was saying that they put one guy into ... a body bag when he wasn't even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him," he said, citing the particular video.
Ma also cited information from other video clips, including "screaming sounds" emerging from crematorium furnaces, "which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive."
RFA was unable to confirm these reports independently. Meanwhile, authorities in the central province of Henan have handed an official reprimand to a lawyer who posted about the numbers of people lining up outside funeral homes in Wuhan.
Liu Yingying is the subject of a disciplinary action by the official lawyers' association in Henan's provincial capital, Zhengzhou after she posted a photo of people lining up outside an Wuhan funeral home to her WeChat account.
The Zhengzhou Lawyers' Association, which is under the control of the municipal justice bureau and therefore the ruling Chinese Communist Party, has accused her of "provoking dissatisfaction with the government" after her post received more than half a million views and more than 10,000 retweets.
The association said its code of practice requires lawyers not to post "inappropriate comments" online. Liu had cooperated with the investigation, admitted her mistake, deleted the post and reflected sincerly on her mistake, it said, adding that it would treat her with leniency in return.
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| A truck load of ash-urns from the crematoriums arriving at a Wuhan funeral home. |
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| Families waiting in line for hours at a funeral home to collect the ash-urns of their love ones. (Family lawyer Liu Yingying was punished by CCP for posting this photo on WeChat.) |