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Wednesday, July 26 7:12 PM SGT

Another Falungong member dies in prison after force feeding

A school teacher member of the outlawed Falungong spiritual group died in a detention center in northern China after police attempted to end her hunger strike by force-feeding her, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said Wednesday.

An Xiukun, 50, an elementary school teacher in Hengshui city, Hebei province, suffocated on June 23 in the Hengshui Administrative Detention Center, after six days on hunger strike protesting her "unjust detention," the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

Police in Hengshui refused to comment on the case.

Zhang Qizeng, An's husband, was subsequently arrested on July 20 and sentenced without trial to three years reform through labor for protesting the manner in which his wife died and demanding compensation, the center said.

The human rights group has recorded the deaths of at least 25 Falungong followers who have died while in police custody since the government banned the group in July 1999.

"Due to the extremely strong prohibition by the central authorities on human rights groups like ours to investigate these kinds of cases, it is difficult to make accurate tabulations, but our center believes that there are far more than 25 cases of such deaths," it said.

An was detained on June 6 on Tiananmen Square in Beijing for protesting at the ban on the group. After continued protests while in detention, police bound her feet with wire, the center said, resulting in her hunger strike.

She had practiced Falungong for three years.

Falungong is a combination of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian teachings that advocates high moral values and clean living through daily group meditation and breathing exercises.

The Chinese government has deemed the group an "evil sect" and views it as the biggest threat to one-party communist rule since the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests were crushed by the Chinese military.

The group's guru, Li Hongzhi, escaped to the United States in 1998 and remains there in exile, despite an arrest warrant issued by the Chinese government.

The center estimates some 10,000 Falungong followers have been sentenced without trial to the administrative punishment of "reform-through-labor," with Falungong followers in every one of the nation's 300 labor camps.

Meanwhile some 450 Falungong followers and leading members of the group have been sentenced in Chinese courts to up to 18 years imprisonment, the center said, while over 600 followers have been detained in mental institutes.

Before its ban last year, the Falungong group boasted a following of around 80 million people in China, although the government estimated there were only two million followers.

Earlier this year, the government announced that nearly 100 Falungong protesters had been rounded up by police every day on Tiananmen Square, a practice that has continued, especially around the first anniversary of the ban on July 22.