I Was Detained at the Police Station Even Though There Was "No Crime" -- Testimony from the Paris New Year Arrest Incident

By a practitioner from England Xie Yunjie

(Clearwisdom.net) My name is Xie Yunjie, I am currently a student at a university in England.

On January 24, 2004 at about 12:30 p.m., I was chatting with my friends from England, Xu Hongyan and Chris, on a street corner of the famous Champs Elysees Avenue, and waited for the Chinese New Year parade to begin.

At that time, several French men in normal clothing walked up to us. One of them started to speak French to me. I said a friendly hello in English, and told him that I could not speak French. However, he continued to speak French to me, so I asked Chris, who understands French, to explain to him the situation. This man made some hand gestures indicating that he wanted me to go with him. Then suddenly he started to push me. I did not know what was going on for a while, and turned my head to look at my friends. I saw they were also surrounded by several not-too-friendly-looking people. This man saw that I was just standing there, and he suddenly grabbed my shoulder and clothes to pull me away. I made an effort to resist and struggle, but to no avail. He pulled me to a police vehicle a dozen meters away, and at that time, my camera was also seized.

I saw my other five friends from England in the police vehicle, and three of them had both their hands cuffed. We had all come to participate in the Falun Gong parade on the January 23 and 25, and I still remembered the acclaim the audience gave us and the warm smiling faces during our performance the day before, but at that point I was shocked to see the police treat us so roughly for no reason. During the process of the unreasonable arrests, and in the police vehicle, we repeatedly asked the police why they treated us like this, but they did not give us an answer.

At about 2 p.m., we were led to the 17th District Police Station. After the registration, we were cuffed to a very long bench. I twice requested that they unlock my handcuffs but was turned down both times. One policewoman said, "So long as you are taken to the police station, you have to be handcuffed. This is a requirement." I told her we had done nothing illegal, and she told me to be quiet. About two hours later, Gao Yudong and I were led to an office, where a female police officer asked for our IDs and made a record.

We asked why she treated us like this. She said that the reason was that we were distributing materials on the street without permission. We replied that we had not done anything and we did not have any materials. In the end, this police officer really could not come up with a reasonable explanation under our inquiries, and then she told us that though she knew what Falun Gong was and that we had not committed any crime, she had no choice but to carry out the order. Finally she asked us to sign on the release warrant, which stated on the line for "reason for arrest" was "no crime."

We stayed in France for a total of three days. Two of the three days, we brought the French people wonderful Chinese traditional culture and a Falun Gong exercise performance. We had to spend the other day in the police station. The reason for our unreasonable detention was merely because my friend had worn a yellow scarf with the embroidered words "Zhen-Shan-Ren" [which means "Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance"].

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/1/30/66212.html

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