Canada – Global News, September 23, 2024
They lived in Beijing, where Kovrig, a former diplomat, worked at an independent global think tank. As they took the final steps into their apartment, they were swarmed.
“I was grabbed out of the blue by about a dozen men in black. They stuffed me into a car and took me to a secret black jail and then proceeded to interrogate me relentlessly and hold me in solitary confinement,” he told Global News, sharing his story of incarceration and the aftermath.
The sit-down interview comes three years after he was released following 1,019 days in a Chinese detention cell. Kovrig is now sharing his story for the first time, including details of his two-and-a-half-year incarceration and meeting his daughter following his release.
He spoke of finding strength from the letters and cards he received from ordinary Canadians, and he warned Canada and its allies about the need to take foreign interference seriously.
“It’s the confinement and the isolation that are really psychologically, brutally difficult, coupled with an interrogation approach that is really just designed not to extract information because it was obvious from the beginning that they were just looking for something that they could use,” Kovrig said. “They were trying to crush my spirit and gaslight me and brainwash me into accepting their narrative and confessing to crimes that I’d never committed.”
Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor became known internationally as the ‘Two Michaels’ following their arrests by Beijing in 2018 on widely condemned Chinese claims of espionage.
The Canadian government said Kovrig and Spavor were political pawns, arbitrarily detained in response to the arrest of Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the request of the United States.
The Chinese courts convicted both men on the widely condemned charges in separate trials but after nearly three years, Meng’s extradition case was dropped and she was allowed to return to China on Sept. 24, 2021. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were freed hours later.
“It’s been a very busy few years, both getting caught up in terms of work, but most importantly, healing and taking care of my family, reconnecting with my friends, travelling around, finding everyone who worked on that crisis and who helped me get back to freedom and thanking them personally,” Kovrig said.
“People forget when someone is taken hostage or detained or subjected to something like this, it’s not just hard on the detainee, it’s brutally hard on the family who faces all kinds of uncertainty and pain and anguish from that and so my loved ones have also needed a lot of help to recover,” he said.
