AFP: US presses China for probe on Falun Gong organ harvesting claim
WASHINGTON, March 31, 2006 The United States pressed
China Friday for a probe into claims by the Falun Gong spiritual group
that thousands of its followers at Chinese concentration camps have
been killed and their organs harvested and sold. "The Chinese have publicly
denied the allegations. We've made the point that a further
investigation would be helpful. We urge that it be done," deputy State
Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters. "Well, obviously, any such
reports are taken very seriously by us. We haven't been able to confirm
them. We have contacted the government of China about them," Ereli
said. Asked whether the United
States had suggested any international investigation, he said: "No,
we've raised it with the Chinese and urged them to investigate." The Falun Gong spiritual
movement had alleged that as many as 75 percent of its 6,000 followers
held in a state-run camp in the Sujiatun district of the northern
Chinese city of Shenyang had been cremated after they were killed and
their organs harvested and sold. In a statement Friday, the
movement, quoting "a veteran medical doctor who has served in the
Shenyang military zone," said there were 36 such camps and that "the
scope of the problem far exceeds that previously imagined." The largest camp,
codenamed "672-S," is said to hold over 120,000 people, among whom are
Falun Gong and other "prisoners of conscience," it said. There has been no
independent confirmation of the Falun Gong reports. The Chinese communist
leadership consider the rise of Falun Gong as a mass movement and a
threat to its power, rights groups have said. Since the banning of the
Falun Gong in 1999, estimates of adherents who died in custody due to
torture, abuse and neglect ranged from several hundred to a few
thousand, according to the State Department annual human rights report
released in early March. In addition to being
sentenced to reeducation-through-labor camps, some Falun Gong members
were sent to detention facilities specifically established to
"rehabilitate" practitioners who refused to recant their belief
voluntarily after release from the camps, it said.
Chinese version available at
http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/4/1/124210.html
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