Six months on, no news of Nobel laureate Liu

BEIJING — Six months after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is still imprisoned, deprived of family visits and his wife is under house arrest. No one is even sure where he is.The Norwegian Nobel Committee sparked fury in Beijing on October 8 when it honoured the now 55-year-old writer, jailed for 11 years on subversion charges, for his "long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".Liu, who until then was little known abroad, became a global cause celebre overnight as Western nations and rights groups lined up to call for his release. For China's communist leaders, he became an instant object of scorn.Since that time, and as Beijing pursues a crackdown on dissent, notably with the recent detention of celebrated artist Ai Weiwei, no news has filtered out about Liu -- not even if he is still being held in a prison in northeast China."We've had no news at all," Renee Xia, the international director of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders activist network, told AFP -- just "two rumours that cannot be independently verified".The first of those rumours was that Liu has been transferred out of the remote Jinzhou prison in the northeastern province of Liaoning and placed under house arrest at an unknown location.Xia noted: "That tweet was not recognisable and was quickly removed."The second, included in an April 1 message sent on Twitter by activist Mo Zhixu, was that Liu would be granted medical parole. But others later poured cold water on that story, calling it a bad April Fool's joke."He is in jail incommunicado, which means nobody knows exactly where he is or anything about him -- this is worrying," Xia said.Liu suffers from liver problems and "his family does not know if he is getting any treatment," she added.Human Rights Watch campaigner Nicholas Bequelin however said there was "no reason for Liu to have been moved", adding: "His Nobel prize means that he probably gets better treatment than the average inmate."The former university professor was sentenced on

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