One of China's most prominent AIDS activists Wan Yanhai has been arrested for allegedly revealing state secrets, his wife said yesterday as human rights groups called for his immediate release.
Wan, who founded and ran the AIDS Action Project, has been missing since late last month. The project is a private group pushing for the rights of China's AIDS sufferers, particularly farmers infected through tainted blood collections.
"Security officials told Liang Yan, who is in charge of student volunteers working with the AIDS Action Project, that my husband has been detained," Wan's wife Su Zhaosheng told reporters from California, where she is studying.
"I was told he has been detained because he was accused of revealing state secrets through his research," she said.
Ever since Wan disappeared on Aug. 25, Su has warned her 38-year-old husband had probably been arrested as he normally contacted her daily.
However police and China's foreign ministry have repeatedly said they knew nothing of his whereabouts.
Yesterday a senior official at China's health ministry, where Wan worked before he formed AIDS Action Project, said he had no information about the activist.
In the weeks before his disappearance, Wan had complained of increasing official harassment, including his group being ordered to vacate its office on a university campus.
Wan's AIDS Action Project has been one of the most vocal groups in China in drawing attention to the plight of farmers who have contracted AIDS through selling their blood to government-approved collectors, thought to number in the millions.
His group's Web site aizhi.org has published names of farmers who died of AIDS after selling blood in villages in central China's Henan province, where the scandal was first revealed.
New York-based Human Rights in China appealed yesterday for Wan's immediate release.
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