(Clearwisdom.net) In Beijing alone, at least eighty Falun Dafa practitioners were subjected to mass arrest and interrogation in the days leading up to the October 1 National Day. Many practitioners' colleagues, family members, and relatives were also interrogated and harassed for no justifiable reasons.

The mass arrest had the following characteristics:

1. The emphasis was on several locations - the Haidian District where many universities are located, truth-clarification material preparation sites, and on suspected key practitioners who had been under police watch over a long time. For example, in the Haidian District alone, in just one night, on September 28, twenty-eight practitioners were arrested.

2. The various districts of the city and even other cities and regions acted in a coordinated fashion. They had made careful, long-term preparations. Many of the arrested practitioners had been followed for several months and even longer. Regarding those targeted practitioners, the authorities had monitored their cell phone usage for a long time. They frequently made use of cell-phone tracking and locating techniques. Dafa disciples Bei Shaohua, Liu Haihong and others were arrested this way.

3. Businesses started by practitioners were targeted for confiscation. Some of the companies were ransacked even before they were in business. Dafa practitioner Liu Yujian, who was teaching an MBA training class at the University of Science and Technology Beijing was considered a principal arrest target by the Beijing City Police Department, because he was the designated legal person of the Beijing New Epoch Cultural Development Company Ltd. His company office was broken into and his computer and office documents were confiscated. Bai Shaohua, an employee of the company, also became a principal arrest target. Bai was followed many times.

4. During this round of persecution, authorities were both frenzied and diffident. To "illegally arrest" Liu Yujian, they went to his wife's employer. His wife is not a Dafa practitioner. They threatened and forced her to lead the police to ransack her home and abduct Liu Yujian when he returned home. After she betrayed her husband under threats, Liu's wife was in deep sorrow, blaming herself.

After arresting Dafa practitioner Bai Shaohua's wife, Ji Lei, general manager of Beijing's Langwei Video Science and Technology Co. Ltd., the authorities carried out a large-scale search at Ji Lei's company. At least five computers were removed from the business and sent to the city police department for "examination." The company's safety cabinet was pried open. All the employees (more than thirty of them) were searched and taken to the Haidian District Wanshousi Police Station. Ceng Hui, an employee of the company, is still detained because the police found Dafa truth-clarifying materials in her bag.

The mass arrest of practitioners prior to October 1 was obviously a political plot. It was done to create an atmosphere of terror among Dafa practitioners and to hinder dissemination of the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party." The authorities were trying to use the Falun Gong issue to bolster the current Chinese government of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, right before the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.