in 2018, in 2019, 4 of the 22 detained in Xinjiang were released, and among the 23 detained in Henan, Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanxi, "several had been released after indoctrination training," while "online media reported that police tortured" those arrested in Fujian. The same United States Department of State quoted repeatedly Bitter Winter as "an online magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China" in the China section of its 2018 International Religious Freedom Report. The American evangelical magazine World called Bitter Winter "a thorn in the side" of the Chinese Communist Party, and reported that in a secret document "the Chinese government has called Bitter Winter an 'overseas hostile website' [境外敌对网站] and instructed its intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, to investigate the group." Criticism In a 1996 piece in Charlie Hebdo, French essayist Renaud Marhic accused CESNUR of being "a scientific screen used to relay [Introvigne's] theses to the complacent media". Scholars Stephen A. Kent and Raffaella Di Marzio have argued that CESNUR's representation of the brainwashing controversy is one-sided, polemical and sometimes without scholarly value. Kent further observed: "Many German and French officials working on issues related to religious 'sects' and human rights do not see CESNUR and Introvigne as neutral parties in the ongoing debates... Consequently, other people and organizations have damaged their reputations (rightly or wrongly) among these officials by associating too closely with CESNUR". In 2001, French journalist Serge Garde accused CESNUR of "systematic interventions in favor of sects brought to justice", naming Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Order of the Solar Temple, the Unification Church and Aum Shinrikyo and opined that "all the sects know they can count on CESNUR". CESNUR again met with controversy when one of the scheduled speakers at the 1997 CESNUR conference, who was to present scholarship on the religious group New Acropolis, was discovered to be a member of the very group she purported to study. Michiel Louter writing for Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer opined: "It is difficult to believe that CESNUR-director Introvigne was not up-to-date on her membership in the group". The participation of the New Acropolis speaker to the conference was canceled after the connection was publicly reported by Dutch publication Trouw. Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack of 1995 In the aftermath of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, CESNUR board member J. Gordon Melton and occasional CESNUR conference speaker James R.