China Aid Association
(Beijing—Oct. 27, 2012) An unidentified motorist forced a Beijing house church pastor’s car off the road on a highway to Beijing, then smashed the car with a club in a nighttime assault.
The attack on Pastor Liu Fenggang took place on Oct. 17 on the Beijing-Harbin highway. The motorist was driving a black SUV with its license plate covered up.
Earlier that day, Pastor Liu had agreed to take a believer from Beijing to Tangshan, in neighboring Hebei province, so that he could take care of some business. They were returning at about 6 p.m. when they reached the toll booth in Xianghe, Hebei. Upon exiting the toll booth, they found a metal fence channeling the traffic into a single lane on the left. Pastor Liu found it strange that a checkpoint had been set up but no policeman was there to inspect the vehicles.
After exiting the checkpoint, Pastor Liu moved into the center lane and had driven for about five kilometers (three miles) when he noticed that a black SUV was starting to squeeze the driver side of his vehicle, a Chinese-made qq car, forcing him into the far right lane. The black SUV continued to push, and Pastor Liu pulled into the emergency lane (shoulder) and stopped. The black SUV also stopped.
After a while, when no one approached his vehicle, Pastor Liu attempted to pull out into the road and resume driving, but the black SUV again blocked his car. When Pastor Liu started to get out to try to find out what was going on, the wife of the believer who had requested the ride yelled, "Don’t get out. Look at his license plate!" Pastor Liu looked and saw that the SUV’s license plate was covered with a black cloth.
Just then, the other driver, a tall man with a large-billed baseball cap wielding a gold-colored metal club, emerged from the driver’s side door of the SUV and ran toward Pastor Liu’s car. He pulled the driver’s side door open, and just as Pastor Liu reached to unbuckle his seatbelt to get out, the man slammed the car door closed. Raising his club, he smashed the windshield, then ran quickly back to his vehicle and drove away.
Because the windshield was made of safety glass and also was covered with plastic film, Pastor Liu sustained just a few cuts on his left arm from the shattered glass.
For a long time, Pastor Liu had been kept under house arrest, and in the past he has been brtually beaten and detained for defending the church’s legal rights. He experienced a similar attack last Easter at the Chengde toll booth in Hebei province. The police still frequently call Pastor Liu in for “chats” and warn him saying, “Don’t think that just because your political rights have been restored that we can’t do anything to you. Keep going to see petitioners and getting on the Internet and we won’t be treating you like this anymore.”
Following the attack, Pastor telephoned church members and friends to tell them what happened and to say that he would not be intimidated by the forces of evil but would continue to walk the path of crucifixion with Christ into eternity.
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