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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"]. Posting date: 2/8/2004 |