Peace and Justice Post

Gao Zhisheng had testified that he was tortured and threatened with death during a previous detention. Photograph: Verna Yu/AFP

Fears are growing for the Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng after his brother said police admitted he “went missing” in September, seven months after being taken into detention.

The firebrand critic of the Communist party has been repeatedly detained by public security agents and has testified that he was tortured and threatened with death. Gao disappeared from his hometown in Shaanxi province on 4 February last year. His family told reporters and human rights groups at the time that he was whisked away by local police and security agents from Beijing.

Since then, his whereabouts have been a mystery, but this week his brother told Associated Press that he had received new and disturbing information from one of the policemen who took Gao away.

Gao Zhyi said the policeman told him that Gao Zhisheng “lost his way and went missing” on 25 September.

The authorities refuse to comment on the case. The ministry of justice asked for faxed questions but did not reply to them. Similar requests for information from Beijing’s Public Security Bureau have been met with silence.

Human rights groups said they were alarmed and called on foreign governments and journalists to press for an explanation of how Gao went missing during his captivity.

Roseann Rife of Amnesty International said everybody should be asking the Chinese authorities where Gao Zhisheng was. “We have been very concerned since last February because there are reports in his own hand about how he was treated in custody last time, when it seemed he was near death.”

Mo Shaoping, a lawyer who was prevented from representing Gao during an earlier trial, said the situation was abnormal.

“If he ran away from a detention centre or died there, the legal responsibility of the authorities is unavoidable. If police told Gao’s relative that he is missing, they have an obligation to find him.”

China‘s security apparatus often detains rights activists and lawyers without explanation or public comment, but the duration of Gao’s disappearance and his testimonies about past treatment have raised concerns.

After a detention in 2007 he wrote an open letter – made public last year – that claimed guards used electric batons on his genitals, burned his eyes with cigarettes and shouted “kill the bastard”. He said they threatened to kill him if he told anyone about his treatment.

Despite constant surveillance and death threats, Gao was arguably fiercer and more confrontational in his criticism of the Communist party than any other activist.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, the former soldier and coal miner said he felt protected because there would be an international outcry if anything happened to him.

“They threaten to arrest me and I say, ‘Go ahead’. I am a warrior who does not care whether I live or die. Such a sacrifice will be nothing to me if it speeds the death of this dictatorship,” he said.

That was two years before the Olympics, when several other prominent activists said they felt protected by international exposure. Since then at least two of them have been imprisoned. Hu Jia was sentenced to three and half years in 2008 and Liu Xiaobo was given 11 years by a court last month.

Chinese censors block information about such cases. Local media are forbidden to report on Gao Zhisheng and a Wikipedia entry about him is blocked.

The crackdown on critical voices continues. This week police detained Zhao Shiying, who signed up to the Charter 08 call for political reform.

Two human rights lawyers revealed that their email accounts had been targeted soon after Google announced that it was reconsidering its presence in China because its database was hacked for information about activists.