Blitz Bureau
WASHINGTON: Three American citizens who had been detained for years in China were released, a State Department spokesperson said on November 27, reported NBC News. They are Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung.
Li, 62, who is from Long Island, New York, was detained in 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in 2018 on espionage charges his family says are baseless. Swidan, a Texas businessman in his 40s, had been detained since 2012 and was sentenced to death with a reprieve in 2019 after being convicted on drug-related charges that a United Nations working group said had no evidential basis.
Li and Swidan were considered “wrongfully detained” by the State Department. John Leung, an American in his 70s who also has permanent residency in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, was sentenced to life in prison last year after being found guilty of espionage by a court in eastern China.
Leung, who was detained in 2021, had been a member of a pro-Beijing group in the United States and had been pictured with senior Chinese officials, according to Hong Kong and Chinese news outlets. Their release was part of a prisoner swap for Xu Yanjun, an officer of China’s Ministry of State Security, and Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national, a US Government official said.
