TT (Swedish Newsagency): Swedish Falun Gong practitioners still being held in China

Three Swedish Falun Gong practitioners are still in China this Friday, Falun Gong practitioners in Sweden announced. One of the three was arrested by the police in Beijing. The Swedish Foreign Department (UD) were not able to get any official notice about the Swedes.

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Finlanders home

Some 40 foreign Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in Tiananmen Square on Thursday. 14 persons, among them two Finnish citizens, were arrested in different hotels the day before.

Most of the arrested were put on planes out of China, while a smaller group was still detained. The two Finlanders are back home. Among the arrested were also Americans, Germans and Britons.

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Pictures of dead

On the movements' American website www.faluninfo.net the number of Falun Gong practitioners who have died due to Chinese imprisonment is listed at 365. Pictures of young Chinese who have been killed follow one another [in a slide show] on the site.

"The Swedes and other Western Falun Gong practitioners who go to China do it out of sympathy for their fellow Chinese," said Lilly Wang.

US President George W Bush is visiting China next Thursday. He has recently expressed concerned over violations of religious' groups freedoms in China.

False immolation?

At a press conference, Falun Gong [practitioners] in G teborg presented a film that critically examines the incident in which five people set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square on January 23, 2001. Beijing claims that the five, among them a woman and her twelve-year daughter who both died later, were Falun Gong practitioners. But according to the film there is a strong indication that they were not and that the two who died did not die by burns, but by other ways. The practitioners claim that the Chinese authorities staged the immolation to slander Falun Gong.

Protective clothing

Several circumstances point to this. How could an incident that happened unexpectedly be recorded with such high quality by Chinese TV? Also, the fire was quickly put out by police who, surprisingly, were equipped with fire extinguishers. The man who set himself on fire did not sit in lotus position as the movements' practitioners do, and that same man did not get such severe burns as would be expected. According to Falun Gong, the man might have had several layers of clothes as protection against the fire.