Police pounced on this [group] member and dragged him away.

Picture: Reuters

BEIJING: Police beat and arrested members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group as hundreds defied a huge security presence to protest in Tiananmen Square yesterday.

Small groups demonstrating against the government's 17-month ban on the movement popped up all over the square throughout the day as thousands of police and soldiers grabbed them and forced them into vans.

AFP journalists saw at least 700 members of the group trucked away as some 20 police vans roamed the square, while thousands of Chinese and overseas tourists looked on.

Falun Gong followers said the protests had begun on New Year's Eve and resumed early yesterday, suggesting the number arrested could be significantly higher.

At one point yesterday morning police were seen grabbing a protester at a rate of one every two minutes.

The main demonstration appeared to have started just after 10am when about four groups of Falun Gong members, positioned at different points across the vast esplanade, suddenly started shouting slogans.

Protesting against Beijing's ban they threw leaflets into the air, and unfurled red and yellow banners with Falun Gong written on them.

Many of the [group] members were thrown to the ground and kicked in the face, before being dragged away. At least one woman had blood pouring from her head, but the police made no effort to help her, as cleaners moved in to swiftly wash away the pool of blood.

Several young children were also taken away as they clung to their mothers, while the square was strewn with shoes that were lost in the melee to get the protesters into the vans.

One woman was beaten severely as she screamed that she was not a member of Falun Gong.

Police left her sprawled on the square in tears as they went after other protesters.

Although the protests died down somewhat by late afternoon, at least 100 Falun Gong followers were seen in the many different police vans parked around the square.

A Falun Gong woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said protests had begun at midnight on New Year's Eve and more would be held on the Lunar Festival which begins on January 24.

Most of those detained Monday were from the countryside, she said. She had been arrested twice previously and spent a month in detention each time. The government has denounced the group, which combines meditation and breathing exercises with Eastern philosophies, as [].

According to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, the government has jailed core leaders of the group for up to 18 years and sent tens of thousands to re-education camps since banning the group.

"Every day in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, groups of practitioners - ordinary people from all strata of society - come to exercise their constitutional right to peacefully appeal to the government, only to be beaten down and dragged away,'' a statement on a Falun Gong website said yesterday.

2 January 2001 / 12:06 AM

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