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China deports

Greenpeace

activists

BEIJING: China deported senior activists from the world environmental group Greenpeace on Wednesday after they pulled off a brazen but brief protest in Tiananmen Square demanding that Beijing end nuclear testing.

The Greenpeace national directors from France and Russia, Penelope Komites and Sasha Knorre, were put aboard an Air France flight to Paris, airline officials said.

Four other activists detained for joining Tuesday's brief protest in Beijing's huge central square were put on an afternoon flight to Hong Kong, officials said.

Greenpeace activists interviewed by telephone before their deportation said two contract photographers who were also detained, a German and a Swiss, faced expulsion. Their whereabouts were not immediately known.

Police and Foreign Ministry officials would not comment.

"Because we signed confessions saying this was our first action in China, they said they would not charge us but would immediately send us out of the country," Komites said.

"We had to confess that we held an illegal protest."

The protest was timed to coincide with Beijing's rumoured plans to hold a nuclear test in the next seven days and its announcement of missile tests off the east coast near Taiwan, which reportedly began on Tuesday.-Reuter