Swarms of plainclothes police took away four foreign activists who tried to unfurl a Tibetan flag outside the main Olympics venue yesterday, squelching the latest attempt to demonstrate during the Beijing Games.
The detentions came a day after authorities warned two elderly Chinese women who applied to protest the loss of their homes during the games that they would be sent to a labor camp for a year.
Early yesterday, police seized four foreign activists protesting Chinese rule in Tibet as they unfurled a Tibetan flag and shouted “Free Tibet” south of the National Stadium, the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said.
PHOTO: AP
The group put the number of police at 50. A spokeswoman for the Beijing Public Security Bureau declined comment.
“The fact that there were so many undercover police following them just made them go with the action urgently,” said Kate Woznow, the group’s campaigns director.
Two photographers were roughed up by plainclothes security officers, forced into cars and taken to a nearby building where they were questioned before being released.
Memory cards from their cameras were confiscated.
The four activists were identified by Students for a Free Tibet as Tibetan-German Florien Norbu Gyanatshang, 30; Mandie McKeown, 41, of Britain; and Americans Jeremy Wells, 38, and John Watterberg, 30.
The whereabouts of the activists was not known. Other foreigners from the group who have staged demonstrations before and during the games have been quickly deported from China.
The rough treatment and intimidation being meted out to foreigners and elderly Chinese underscores the authorities’ determination to prevent any disruption during the Olympics, even though the games’ organizers last month said demonstrations would be allowed in designated areas.
But the Games have provided a tempting spotlight to several groups of protesters.
The two elderly Chinese women — Wu Dianyuan, 79, and her neighbor, Wang Xiuying, 77 — were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a yearlong term of re-education through labor.
They were under surveillance by a neighborhood watch group, said Li Xuehui, Wu’s son. The nature of their “crime” remained unknown.
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