Liu Wei'an, Freelance
Medium:Print
Charge:Retaliatory
Imprisoned:June 5, 2013
Hu Yazhu, Nanfang Daily
Medium:Print
Charge:Retaliatory
Imprisoned:June 21, 2013

The Shaoguan People's Procuratorate, a state legal body, issued a statement in June 2013 that said Hu and Liu had been arrested in Guangdong province after confessing to accepting bribes while covering events in the northern city of Shaoguan.

Hu, a staff reporter for the official Guangdong Communist Party newspaper Nanfang Daily, and Liu, a freelance writer, had both written articles published in 2011 in Nanfang Daily and on news websites about a dispute involving the illegal extraction of rare minerals in Shaoguan, according to news reports.

The prosecutors' statement said Hu had accepted 95,000 yuan (US$16,000) in bribes, but did not offer a specific amount for Liu. The statement did not offer further details. The pair were stripped of their press cards and banned from journalism for life, according to the state-run paper China Daily.

Users on Weibo, China's microblog service, said they suspected the reporters had been arrested in an act of revenge by local authorities because their reports had exposed problems in the government and judiciary, according to CPJ research.

Shaoguan authorities had not disclosed the health, whereabouts, or legal status of the journalists by late 2014.

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