A popular Chinese blogger, detained earlier this year for his comments on military casualties in Galwan valley clash with India, has been sentenced to eight months in prison. Qiu Ziming, an internet celebrity with more than 2.5 million followers, on Monday received a jail term of eight months for ''defaming martyrs'', marking the first such case in China since a new amendment was attached to the Criminal Law, reported Global Times.
The blogger, who is known online as ''Labixiaoqiu'', was also ordered by a court to publicly apologise through major domestic portals and the national media within 10 days. The court noted that Qiu had ''truthfully confessed to his crime'', entered a guilty plea and said in court that he would never commit the crime again, therefore he was getting a lighter sentence. "I feel extremely ashamed of myself, and I'm very sorry," said the 38-year-old.
The comments came after China admitted for the first time that four of its soldiers had been killed and one seriously wounded in the clash that took place in the Himalayas. Qiu, a former reporter with the weekly Economic Observer, had published two posts that suggested a commander survived the clashes because he was the highest-ranking officer there. He also suggested that more Chinese soldiers might have been killed in the conflict than those disclosed by the authorities.
In February, Russian news agency TASS had claimed that 45 Chinese soldiers were killed in the clashes.
