China sentences Swedish bookseller to 10 years in prison

BEIJING — A court in eastern China announced Tuesday that it has sentenced Gui Minhai, a naturalized Swedish citizen, to 10 years in prison.

The Ningbo Intermediate People’s Court convicted Gui of “illegally providing intelligence overseas,” the court said in a statement published online.

For years, Gui sold gossipy books about Chinese leaders in the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong. He first disappeared in 2015, when he was believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents from his seaside home in Thailand.

After Gui was released into house arrest in Ningbo, the eastern Chinese city where he was born, police detained him once again in 2018 while he was in the company of two Swedish diplomats with whom he was travelling to Beijing.

The Associated Press