Liu Xiaobo's friends angry after hastily arranged sea burial
16 July 2017 5:02 PM GMT
Friends of the late Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo, have voiced rage and disgust after the announcement that the dissident's ashes had been cast into the ocean off north-eastern China in a hastily arranged sea burial they believe was designed to deny supporters a place of pilgrimage.
"This is too evil, too evil," the exiled author Liao Yiwu, a close friend, told the Guardian after the details of Liu's cremation and sea burial emerged on Saturday afternoon. "They are a bunch of gangsters."
Mo Zhixu, another friend and activist, said: "The regime must be insane. They have done the worst thing you could have possibly imagined."
The artist Ai Weiwei said he suspected authorities had decided to bury Liu at sea to deny his supporters "a physical memorial site" at which to pay homage to him and his ideas. "It is a play," he said. "Sad but real."
Liu died on Thursday, aged 61, becoming the first Nobel peace prize winner to die in custody since the 1935 recipient, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, died under surveillance after years confined to Nazi concentration camps.
His death sparked a wave of condemnation, which China rejected as meddling in its "domestic affairs".
Speaking at a press briefing in the city of Shenyang, where Liu died, on Saturday afternoon a government spokesman claimed the activist's relatives had – of their own volition – taken his ashes out to sea after he was cremated early that morning.
The official said family members had walked slowly on to the deck of the funeral company's ship carrying white and yellow chrysanthemums and a biodegradable container which was lowered into the waters below. "They placed the urn into the vast ocean," the spokesperson told reporters, without taking questions.
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