Friends of the late Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo, have voiced rage and disgust after the announcement that the dissident’s ashes had been cast into the ocean off north-eastern China in a hastily arranged sea burial they believe was designed to deny supporters a place of pilgrimage. “This is too evil, too evil,” the exiled author Liao Yiwu, a close friend, told the Guardian after the details of Liu’s cremation and sea burial emerged on Saturday afternoon. “They are a bunch of gangsters. Mo Zhixu, another friend and activist, said: “The regime must be insane. They have done the worst thing you could have possibly imagined.”
The artist Ai Weiwei said he suspected authorities had decided to bury Liu at sea to deny his supporters “a physical memorial site” at which to pay homage to him and his ideas. “It is a play,” he said. “Sad but real.”
