A Chinese employee at Bloomberg News, Haze Fan, was released on bail in January, according to the Chinese embassy in Washington, more than a year after plainclothes security officials detained her.

Fan’s case is still under investigation, but she is on bail pending trial, the Chinese embassy said in a statement dated May 6.

Bloomberg News said on Tuesday it had been unable to reach Fan since her release. It had previously reported that Fan was last seen on December 7, 2020, being escorted from her apartment, and that she had been detained on potential national security violations.

News of her detention sent reverberations through the foreign journalist community in China, where news media organisations have been harassed and foreign reporters expelled amid an increasingly hostile reporting environment.

Fan was taken away by investigators not long after she had been in touch with a Bloomberg editor, according to a Bloomberg article in 2020. The company has previously said it did not know why Fan had been detained, but that it had sought information about her whereabouts from both the Chinese government and China’s embassy in Washington.

Bloomberg said it was made aware of the embassy statement over the weekend.

(New York Times News Service)