HONG KONG, Mar 30, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) A Qinghua University classmate of Chinese Vice-President Hu Jintao has been sentenced without trial to two years of "re-education-through-labour" for his belief in the banned Falungong spiritual movement, a Hong Kong-based rights group said Thursday.

Zhang Mengya was sentenced to the administrative punishment earlier this month by the Guangzhou public security bureau in southern Guangdong province, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said in a faxed report.

He had previously tried to directly petition the vice-president over last July's ban on the spiritual group, but was arrested by Beijing police in January, the center said.

Zhang graduated as a hydro-electrical engineer from the prestigious Qinghua University in 1959, the centre said, while Hu entered the university in 1960 and graduated as a hydro-electrical engineer in 1965.

The two had met as recently as 1998, the center said.

Zhang had been a professor at the Guangdong Institute of Electrical Power, it said.

((c) 2000 Agence France Presse)