The Associated Press

12/13/00 8:45 AM

BEIJING (AP) -- Braving heavy police security, hundreds of friends and family attended the funeral Wednesday of a member of the banned Chinese Falun Gong meditation [group] who died, allegedly of police abuse.

Mourners, undeterred by the political sensitivity surrounding the outlawed [group], boarded five buses for the funeral from the Beijing university where Zhao Xin taught before her death Monday following neck injuries allegedly sustained in police custody.

Other mourners joined the gathering at the Babaoshan cemetery in western Beijing, where her body arrived in a van bedecked with traditional Buddhist saffron-yellow pennants -- a color often favored for Falun Gong banners and uniforms. However, no [group] emblems or symbols were visible during the brief funeral ceremony.

As many as three dozen uniformed and plainclothes police kept watch inside and outside the cemetery but did not turn mourners away. Foreign reporters, however, were ordered away and trailed by officers, apparently to deter mourners from granting interviews.

Zhao, 32, a Falun Gong practitioner for two years, had taken part in numerous protests and been repeatedly arrested after the government outlawed the group as a social menace in July 1999, according to U.S.-based Falun Gong practitioners.

Zhao, an assistant professor at the business college of Beijing's Industry and Commerce University, was last arrested six months ago with 20 other Falun Gong practitioners as they practiced the group's slow motion exercises in a Beijing park, the U.S.-based adherents said in a statement.

In detention, she refused to give police her name or other personal information and began a hunger strike, the statement said.

Three days after her arrest, on June 22, detention center guards sent Zhao to a hospital with three fractured neck vertebrae, minor head injuries and breathing problems, the statement said. After an operation and three months of hospital treatment, she went home because her family could no longer afford the medical fees. She died Monday.

Police claimed Zhao refused to be force-fed and injured herself by banging her head against a wall, the statement said.

But the statement disputed the police account saying "her wound is a localized blunt fracture, which can only be caused by a strong external force" and that Zhao was "persecuted to death."

Authorities have detained tens of thousands of Falun Gong followers for protesting and practicing in public in the sustained 17-month crackdown on the [group].

As many as 5,000 followers have been jailed in labor camps and at least 74 have died in custody from beatings, neglect or other abuse, according to human rights groups.

The government has denied any mistreatment of detained [group] members. It claims to have protected civil rights by banning the group, which it []

Followers, however, believe Falun Gong's meditation and exercise routine promotes health and find moral guidance in its eclectic mix of Buddhist and Taoist ideas and the theories of its founder Li Hongzhi, who now lives in the United States.