A citizen journalist who had been reporting on Covid-19 from Wuhan has been arrested and charged by the Chinese government, according to reports.
Shanghai-born 40-year-old Chinese citizen, Zhang Zhan, had been uploading her stories to social media from the city in the Hubei province where the Covid-19 outbreak originated.
Powerful footage Ms Zhang had live-streamed to social media sites included proof of crematoriums operating late into the night in the city as death tolls rose.
She had also visited quarantine hospitals and visited the perimeter of the virus-study laboratory in the city which has been alleged to have been the source of the outbreak - an accusation stringently denied by China.
The Times reported on Wednesday that Ms Zhang - who had been in the city to collect first-hand accounts for over three months - is believed to have been arrested and charged in a crackdown on independent journalism by Beijing.
The paper reported that she could face up to seven years in jail after being arrested on May 14 and later charged with "provocation and trouble making”.
Freedom of speech is not considered a right under the current Chinese Communist Party rule. The Party controls all news media and censors content and access to the internet. The low official death toll put forward by Beijing - 4,634 from 83,418 confirmed cases - has been doubted.
Ms Zhang, who had previously been arrested by Chinese police and has also been a vocal supporter of democracy in Hong Kong, had reported in a video that “the problem our country faces is that everything is being covered up”.
She is now one of four citizen journalists known to have been detained or to have disappeared after they posted accounts from Wuhan, according to the paper.
The news comes after Chinese officials claimed that a second cluster of the novel coronavirus that emerged in Beijing linked to a wholesale market was "largely under control".
It made headlines around the world when 34-year-old Li Wenliang, an eye doctor in Wuhan, died from the virus after having been given severe oral warnings by authorities for posting a message onto social media to warn other medics of a "SARS-like" disease he was seeing emerge in his patients in January.
