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China releases U.S. Falun Gong practitioner

BEIJING: Chinese police released an American follower of Falun Gong on Saturday, one week after she was detained on Tiananmen Square during a demonstration by members of the outlawed spiritual movement.

Tracy Zhao, a 30-year-old flight attendant from New York City, was put on a Northwest Airlines flight from Beijing to Detroit on Saturday morning, her boyfriend quoted the U.S. embassy in Beijing as telling him.

"She's been released and is on her way back," Chong-Li Lin, who is also from New York, told Reuters by telephone in Beijing.

"The embassy never got a chance to see her, so at this point I don't know her condition," he said.

Zhao, who emigrated from China 10 years ago, was among scores of people detained in a chaotic police sweep in Tiananmen Square on February 4, the eve of the Lunar New Year.

At midnight, Falun Gong members unfurled banners on the square in an act of defiance against official repression. Police detained more than 100 people, kicking and punching many of them.

Zhao, who had been informed of the protest beforehand, was snapping photographs of the crackdown when police took her onto a bus and then to a detention centre outside Beijing, Lin said.

Zhao, Lin and about half a dozen other U.S. Falun Gong members had arrived in Beijing a day earlier to meet local practitioners, Lin said.

"We wanted to go to China to show our support and find out more about the conditions people experience here," he said, adding they were not there to participate in the protest.

"We just wanted to see what would happen."

A witness had said another foreign woman, Australian Shelley Jiang, was also detained in the round up. Her whereabouts were unknown.

Falun Gong members have continued to stage bold protests more than six months after authorities banned the movement, a mishmash of Buddhism and Chinese mysticism that preaches salvation from a morally corrupt world misguided by science and technology.

Some 2,000 followers have been detained across the country in the past week, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre of Human Rights & Democratic Movement in China.

President Jiang Zemin and other top leaders were first shocked by Falun Gong when 10,000 adherents surrounded the central leadership compound in Beijing last April to demand official recognition for their faith.

It was the largest protest in the capital since student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.

In July, Falun Gong was declared illegal and the government mounted a massive propaganda campaign while secret police infiltrated the group and arrested hundreds of its leaders.

More than 5,000 members have been sent to labour camps, and 300 have been imprisoned for terms spanning up to 18 years, according to the Hong Kong-based rights group.

The government, which calls Falun Gong an "evil cult", has declared a high rate of success convincing the group's millions of adherents to renounce their faith.

But many followers still practice Falun Gong meditation exercises in the privacy of their homes, while others use mobile phones and the Internet to organise local chapters and carry out protests. -Reuters