Friday November 1, 2002

A Falun Gong practitioner claims that her husband has been taken hostage by Beijing police after she filed a lawsuit against China's leadership for human rights abuses.

Chinese asylum seeker Jennifer Zheng Zeng, 36, who lives in Melbourne with fellow Falun Gong [practitioners], said Friday she feared for the safety of her husband Cao Jianwei whose whereabouts were unknown.

She believed his arrest was related to her legal action against Chinese President Jiang Zemin because her husband is not a Falun Gong practitioner.

"I can't imagine any other reason for his arrest except to keep him as a hostage to threaten me," she said.

China, [...] has jailed or sent to labor camps tens of thousands of adherents since it banned the movement in July 1999.

On October 21, Zeng was one of seven plaintiffs from six countries who filed a lawsuit with the UN committees on torture and human rights which was timed to coincide with Jiang's visit to the United States.

Another lawsuit was filed against Jiang by Falun Gong supporters in the US Federal courts during his visit.

Mrs. Zeng's nine-year-old daughter had been staying with elderly grandparents after police raided the couple's home on October 25, taking computers and arresting her 40-year-old husband.

The couple's friends in Beijing had been unable to locate Cao, a former manager of a Beijing University education investment company.

Mrs. Zeng heard of her husband's arrest through her parents-in-law.

"The police didn't tell them where he was taken to or on what ground he was arrested," she said. "We have no information about where he was detained and why he was taken away."

The couple came to Australia on a business trip in September last year.

Zeng's husband returned while she stayed behind, seeking refugee status because she feared she would be imprisoned for being a Falun Gong [practitioner] if she went back to China.

In June, 2000, she was sentenced without trial to one year in a forced labour camp where she said she was subjected to shock treatment and worked 21 hours a day making toy rabbits [...] .

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021101/1/34bta.html