January 26, 2002 The 61-year-old Mississauga mother deported from China for practicing Falun Gong is safely home -- tired, unharmed and as committed to the spiritual movement as ever.

Wearing the same pale blue pantsuit, lavender turtleneck and black walking shoes she wore while demonstrating in Tiananmen Square, Connie Chipkar said yesterday in Toronto she felt "threatened all the time" while in police custody.

But she was never mistreated, and in fact, feels she touched her guards' hearts. "I treated the captors as my friends," she said. "All along, I expected to be hit or attacked, but they drove me here and there and eventually I wound up at the airport."

She flew to Vienna, then London and arrived at Pearson airport around midnight Thursday.

Ms. Chipkar, 61, has been practising the meditative, self-improvement exercises for over four years. China banned Falun Gong two and a half years ago and has brutally cracked down on practitioners.

To bring attention to their plight, Ms. Chipkar has spent the past four months visiting 14 countries across Europe, wearing a sash saying "Falun Gong" and "SOS."

She arrived in Beijing on Jan. 22 and phoned her son, Joel Chipkar, before her visit to the square. When he didn't hear from her again, Mr. Chipkar knew something had happened.

"You see a lady like this, she doesn't look like she's trying to overthrow the government," he said.

Ms. Chipkar stared intently at his mother as she described how she walked to the square and took off her coat to reveal her sash, only to have it ripped off moments later by a plainclothes policeman. Police bundled her into a van and took her to the station, where a female officer interrogated her for three and a half hours.

Ms. Chipkar says she told the woman: "Between you and I, mother to mother, we cannot save the world."

Now that she's home, Ms. Chipkar says she has no plans to travel again soon. She is banned for five years from visiting China.

Last Nov. 22, Mr. Chipkar -- also a practitioner -- was among 35 Westerners who attracted media coverage after they were expelled from China for protesting the government's repression of Falun Gong.

Ms. Chipkar denied her trip was a publicity stunt. "I haven't been having publicity, I've been doing it from my heart," she said. "As long as people are being tortured to death for being good people, how can a person not do something about it?"

At a Toronto, press conference yesterday, Connie Chipkar demonstrated how her, wrists were grabbed during interrogation by Chinese police.