Nine members of a sect were arrested during a meeting in Hubei province and
their publications seized, a police official for Zhushan district said
yesterday.
The Kuangye Zhaimen sect, whose name means "vast country, narrow
gate", had 70 to 80 members, two or three of whom had been arrested
earlier, the official said.
The group, which the authorities described as a "deviant cult",
preached the healing of sickness through prayer, according to a police
investigation cited last Saturday by the Beijing Legal Times.
It said some farmers had abandoned their fields to proselytise for the sect.
Police arrested the nine last Tuesday at a monthly meeting of the sect in the
village of Fengkoubei, the law journal said.
The arrests came as five more members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual
movement reportedly died after beatings in police custody, the group's US-based
information centre said.
The centre said in a statement on September 15 that it had details of 283
adherents who had died from torture during detention in China, but quoted
government sources putting the actual number at more than 1,000.
Three of the five men died after police beat and force-fed them when they went
on a hunger strike in protest at their detention, the statement said.
Police in the provinces of Sichuan, Jiangxi and Shandong, where Falun Gong said
the men died between April and August this year, declined to comment.
China banned Falun Gong in 1999, branding it an "evil cult", after
the quasi-religious group shocked leaders with a mass protest around the
Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, demanding official recognition.
A spokesman for the group, Adam Montanaro, said he thought China would arrest
more adherents in coming weeks.
"Chinese leaders have traditionally prepared for large-scale public
celebrations, such as China's National Day, coming up on October 1, by rounding
up practitioners of Falun Gong who might reveal the persecution campaign,"
he said.
Mr Montanaro added that he thought President Jiang Zemin would escalate the
persecution of Falun Gong believers while the world's attention was focused on
the attacks on the United States.