Saturday, March 30, 2002

(CP) - A Canadian woman who said she was detained in Beijing for handing out leaflets promoting the banned Falun Gong movement was back on home turf late Friday night after a journey that began 24 hours earlier in a jail cell in Beijing.

With minor scrapes and bruises accrued during the 24 hours of her arrest, 22-year-old Christine Loftus arrived in her hometown of Barrie, Ont. late Friday night. She was concerned about the fate of her American boyfriend Jason Pomerleau, 25, whom she last saw in a Beijing cell as she was being escorted out of the police station.

She was told by officials Pomerleau would be released within 24 hours of her expulsion from Beijing. He promised to call her as soon as he was released, but as of Saturday morning, she had not heard from Pomerleau.

Loftus said she was roughed up a little during her detention.

"We were dragged into an underground parking lot, I was grabbed by the back of my neck .á.á. at one point I was thrown on the floor and had my arm twisted and they tried to break my thumb. And they stepped on me as well and threw me onto the floor of the jail cell and I wasn't fed for the first 20 hours. They were really dirty conditions."

Loftus's twin brother, Jason, was thrown out of China in February, after taking part in a protest on Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.

At the time, he told The Canadian Press he was punched, choked, had his hair pulled, arm twisted and was threatened while detained.

Jason Loftus called Ottawa's Department of Foreign Affairs on Thursday to let them know his sister had been arrested. Officials in Ottawa then contacted the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. Canadian Embassy officials, in turn, contacted the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and "so far we have not received any report whatsoever to corroborate (Loftus's arrest)," said Reynald Doiron, a foreign affairs spokesman said Saturday from Ottawa.

"But we are going to stay in touch with our Embassy to find out what may have happened," Doiron added.

Until she and Pomerleau were arrested Thursday, Loftus said they were very well received by the Chinese.

"When we started handing out flyers they just crowded around. They were passing them to each other .á.á. I was surprised, I didn't think it would be that easy, I thought we'd have to break through a lot of notions that were created by the government," said Loftus, a student of child and youth studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

Falun Gong - a practice of holistic health, meditation and exercise - was first banned by China in 1999. [...]

Followers say by 1999 there were 100 million Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong, a system that has no hierarchy or leader, no money collection, no religious rituals, and encourages solitary practice.

Thousands of Falun Gong members have been detained in China and the group says hundreds have been killed by police.

Loftus first began practising Falun Gong with her twin brother 3 years ago. She borrowed money from a friend to fund her trip to China.

Falun Gong's founder, Li Hongzhi, was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pomerleau works at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, his family said.

Pomerleau's brother Daniel, 20, was deported Wednesday after being picked up while passing out Falun Gong literature.

http://www.canada.com/search/site/story.asp?id=0EC73223-0325-4F43-8FDF-AE4CD47C229E