Four members of the banned Falungong group have been jailed for up to 16 years in China for hijacking a cable television station to broadcast sect propaganda, state press said.
The four were convicted by an intermediate court in southwestern Chongqing municipality Friday for "using an evil sect to obstruct the implementation of the law", Xinhua news agency said.
The court also convicted the four of "using an evil sect to disrupt television broadcasts", Xinhua said. It did not say how long the illegal broadcast lasted or how many people saw it.
The broadcast promoting Falungong went out on January 1 on a cable TV station in Chongqing, China's largest autonomous municipality with a population of some 30 million.
Jin Wei was sentenced to 16 years in jail for his part in the illegal broadcast and Li Xiangdong got 15 years, while two others were jailed for at least seven years.
Another person implicated in the incident had died in police custody since the group was arrested in January, the report said without elaborating.
The January incident appeared to be the first such illegal Falungong broadcast in China. It preceded a 20 minute broadcast in March of two Falungong films in northeastern Jilin province and a broadcast of more than an hour in neighboring Heilongjiang province in April.
Those two broadcasts were reported to have been seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Nine people have been arrested for the broadcast in Changchun city, Jilin province and are awaiting trial. It is unclear how many have been arrested for the broadcast in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province.
Since Falungong was banned as "an evil cult" in July 1999, tens of thousands of adherents have been jailed or sent to labor camp, activists say.
The group's New York headquarters has alleged that up to 200 followers have died in police custody, mostly from police beatings and maltreatment.