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Ex-security official says CCP is `soaked in blood'

"When you wake up from the nightmare and discover what you had worshipped is actually a demon, and all it has made you do is go against your conscience, the feelings of being cheated and fooled are a mixture of the deepest anger, regret and grief."

Han Guangsheng, Chinese asylum-seeker

Emerging from the shadows of anonymity for the first time since defecting to Canada four years ago, a former top Chinese security official chastised his homeland on Friday for a litany of human-rights abuses.

In his first public appearance, Han Guangsheng (韓廣生), a former prison and labor camp supervisor in northeastern China, told an audience of about 100 that he saw political prisoners being subjected to electric shocks and beaten by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

"Its hands are soaked with people's blood," the lanky, bespectacled 52-year-old said through an interpreter.

The government maintains a network of spies abroad, some of whom pose as journalists, and secretly but routinely opens personal mail, he added.

SHOCKED

Han's thumbs trembled nervously as he recounted seeing a 15-year-old girl shocked with an electric baton after refusing to renounce her belief in Falun Gong, a spiritual movement condemned by the Chinese government as a cult.

Han also worked for China's Public Security Bureau, working his way up to the post of deputy head for the agency's office in Shenyang, capital of the northeastern industrial province of Liaoning.

He left the organization and his country in September 2001 under the guise of a fact-finding mission about a school with links to China, saying he believed he was little more than a cog in a brutal regime.

"When you wake up from the nightmare and discover what you had worshipped is actually a demon, and all it has made you do is go against your conscience, the feelings of being cheated and fooled are a mixture of the deepest anger, regret and grief," he told the University of Toronto conference on China as two rows of security officers kept watch.

Han, who says he was inspired to come forward by two other Chinese officials who defected to Australia, pleaded with others to do the same.

"To the members of the CCP who still have a sense of justice, if you want to save yourself, you must take the path of being reborn and make a new start," he said, before beating a hasty retreat from the conference.

DENIAL

No one at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa was immediately available to respond to Han's allegations.

But the embassy has repeatedly denied that the Chinese government condones the abuse of prisoners or engages in espionage.

Han, whose application for political asylum in Canada was rejected in April, fears he will be executed if he is forced to return to his homeland.

He faces possible deportation after the federal Immigration and Refugee Board ruled him ineligible to stay in Canada because he was a "willing accomplice" in crimes against humanity in his former job.

Han, who runs a small business in Toronto's Chinatown, said he would ask the Federal Court of Canada for a judicial review of the decision.
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