Gui Minhai’s daughter has not heard from him since being told of release a week ago, and fears he has been forcibly disappeared again

The daughter of a Swedish bookseller who has spent more than two years in Chinese custody after vanishing from his holiday home in Thailand says she is deeply concerned for his safety and fears he has been forcibly disappeared for a second time, amid unconfirmed reports that he has been freed.

Gui Minhai vanished from his beachfront apartment in the Thai resort town of Pattaya in October 2015 and subsequently reappeared behind bars in mainland China, where he was accused of involvement in a hit-and-run incident and forced to make a televised confession.

Before his suspected abduction Gui, 53, had run a Hong Kong-based publishing house that specialised in tabloid-style books delving into the private lives of China’s Communist party elite.



His disappearance – and that of four other booksellers, including one British citizen – was seen as part of a wider crackdown on dissent that has unfolded in China since Xi Jinping took office in 2012.



Xi, who on Tuesday was enshrined as China’s most powerful leader since Mao, has overseen a wide-ranging offensive against potential opponents including human rights lawyers, feminist activists, liberal scholars and booksellers.

In June last year, one of the other abducted booksellers, Lam Wing-kee, claimed he had been kidnapped by Chinese “special forces” as part of a coordinated effort to silence criticism of China’s leadership.

On Tuesday, Sofia Karlberg, a spokeswoman for Sweden’s foreign office, said Swedish officials had been informed by Beijing that Gui had been freed. She gave no further details.

The Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, tweeted:

Margot Wallström (@margotwallstrom) Welcoming official Chinese information about release of Swe citizen Gui Minhai. Still occupied w the matter & seeking further clarification.

However, on Tuesday evening, Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, said she had heard nothing from her father since his supposed release at the start of last week and had decided to speak out because she feared he had been disappeared by Chinese authorities for a second time.

“I don’t know what is going on and I don’t think anybody else does. It is a confusing situation,” she said. “He has allegedly been released but it looks like he is still in some sort of custody.”

She added: “I find this development very worrying. It should be positive news that they are saying that he is being released. But the fact that nobody can contact him and nobody knows where he is, legally constitutes an enforced disappearance, again.

“At least before we did have an idea very vaguely of where he might be. Whereas now we have no idea and there aren’t any indications of what is going to happen next. So I am just worried that if he is indeed held by the Chinese authorities somewhere that they are able to do whatever they want to him without our knowledge.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Gui: ‘This week I have slept with my phone on my pillow waiting for my father to call.’ Photograph: Angela Gui

In an online statement, Angela Gui said the Swedish embassy had sent senior officials to the place where her father was said to have been held, and where Swedish consular officers visited him on three occasions.

“However, as they arrived in the morning of the 17th [October] an official told them that my father had already been released at midnight,” she wrote. “They were also told that he was ‘free to travel’ and that they had no idea where he was.”

She said the plot thickened on Monday when “the Swedish consulate general in Shanghai received a strange phone call from someone claiming to be my father”.



“He was speaking Swedish and claimed that he intended to apply for a Swedish passport in one or two months but that before doing so he wanted to spend some time with his mother ‘who is ill’.



“To my knowledge my grandmother is not ill. My father is not in fact with her. It is still very unclear where he is,” Angela Gui wrote. “This week I have slept with my phone on my pillow waiting for my father to call. I will continue to do so until he does.”

Calls to the Swedish embassy in Beijing went unanswered on Tuesday afternoon.



Writing in the Guardian in June, Gui’s daughter said his only “crime” had been to publish and sell books that were critical of the central Chinese government.

“So paranoid is Beijing about its public image that it chooses to carry out cross-border kidnappings over some books,” she wrote. “My father’s case is only one of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong.”

Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based activist for Amnesty International, said: “The news of Gui Minhai’s release is positive but must be treated with caution. It remains to be seen if he is genuinely free. At every step the authorities have shown a flagrant disregard for due process, from when he went missing to the so-called TV confession.

“The system is designed to break people and force them to go along with the Chinese government’s version of events if they are to have any chance of being released. If Gui Minhai is truly free, he must be able to leave China if he wishes and contact his family, free from any harassment of the Chinese government.”

Angela Gui said: “If he has in fact been released then this needs to mean that he is free to travel, not just within the country but also back home if that is what he wants to do … and it also means that he is allowed to contact his family which he doesn’t seem to be at present.”