BEIJING, Jul 19, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Two more members of the outlawed Falungong spiritual movement have died while in Chinese police detention, officials and relatives told AFP on Wednesday.
The latest deaths brings to at least 24 the number of Falungong practitioners who have died from police maltreatment or hunger strikes since Chinese authorities banned the movement one year ago, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
One of the two recent victims, 44-year-old Li Zaiji, died on July 7 while serving in a reform-through-labor institution in northeastern Jilin city, according to local authorities.
"It's a normal death," said a municipal official in charge of dealing with the banned movement, who gave her surname as Yu.
"He suffered from dysentery."
But the Hong Kong-based information center said that when relatives saw Li's body after his death, they discovered numerous wounds and bandages covering even his eyes.
Police declined to explain how the wounds on Li's body had come about, and at his cremation last Friday they dispatched 100 officers, the center said.
The other victim, Wang Peisheng, 68, died while in detention in Weifang city in the eastern province of Shandong province on Wednesday last week.
There were no signs that police had directly maltreated Wang, formerly the second-ranking Falungong member in Weifang, his wife Liu Xiulian said.
"My son checked the body, and it looked normal, no wounds," she told AFP. "It didn't look like he'd been tortured."
The Hong Kong-based center quoted Falungong members as saying that the cause of Wang's death may have been bad ventilation in the detention center, combined with crowded cells and warm weather.
Falungong is a traditional Chinese mystic belief based on the teachings of exiled master Li Hongzhi, who advocates Confucian and Buddhist moral values, and group breathing and meditation exercises.
On Saturday, it will be one year since the government banned the Falungong movement, and protests are expected to increase in the run-up to the anniversary.
Since the movement was banned in China, tens of thousands of practitioners have been detained and core leaders given jail terms of up to 18 years for protesting and refusing to give up their beliefs.