Reuters: China jails 13 more Falun Gong activists

Tuesday March 13, 7:24 PM

BEIJING (Reuters) - A court in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin jailed 13 members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement this week for up to six years for protesting and distributing sect pamphlets, a local newspaper said.

The sentences reported in Tianjin's Jinwan Bao evening newspaper on Monday bring to 50 the number of members of Falun Gong jailed this month in Beijing and Tianjin alone.

The Tianjin verdicts included a six-year sentence on Cao Chengming, 53, for unfolding a Falun Gong banner at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in a protest with other adherents last October 1, China's National Day, the newspaper said.

Cao, whose banner read "Falun Gong is not an evil cult", was convicted or "using a cult to obstruct the law", said the newspaper, seen in Beijing on Tuesday. Fellow protester Hao Nianxiang was jailed for four years.

In a separate Tianjin case, Yang Cuilan, 42, was jailed for six years on the same charges for reproducing and disseminating Falun Gong fliers, audiotapes and video cassettes last October, the newspaper said.

On March 1, courts in Beijing jailed 37 Falun Gong followers for up to 10 years for disseminating statements downloaded from the spiritual group's Websites. The defendants had distributed fliers opposing the ban China imposed on the group in July 1999.

Despite 19 months of an increasingly ruthless campaign to snuff out the Falun Gong and several [party's name omitted] declarations of victory, the group has continued its protests.

Since Falun Gong was banned, tens of thousands of followers have been detained for protesting. Human rights groups say several thousand are in labour camps and that more than 100 have died of abuse in police custody.

Last week, exiled Falun Gong [founder] Li Hongzhi issued a statement on the group's website saying China's crackdown was futile and that adherents who had recanted their beliefs under duress would resume their practices.

"Although many people have been beaten to death, beaten to disability, or sent to mental hospitals, this has not changed true cultivators' steadfast, righteous thoughts," Li wrote in a March 4 message on the website www.clearwisdom.net. ...

The United States, due to propose a resolution censuring Beijing at a U.N. rights meeting in Geneva this month, condemned alleged abuses of Falun Gong followers in a human rights report which said the rights situation in China had worsened in 2000. ...

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