World News | New York Chinese Secret Police Station Leads to Arrests

NEW YORK, April 18 (AP) — Two men were arrested Monday on charges they helped create a secret police station in New York City on behalf of the Chinese government, and about three dozen officers in China’s national police force have been charged with using social media, authorities said Monday. , to harass dissidents in the United States.

Taken together, the cases are part of a series of Justice Department prosecutions in recent years aimed at undermining the Chinese government’s efforts in the United States to locate and suppress speech by pro-democracy activists and others who have publicly criticized Beijing’s policies.

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One of the three cases announced Monday involved a local branch of China’s Ministry of Public Security that once operated out of an office building near Manhattan’s Chinatown that was closed last fall amid an FBI investigation.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the two men who were arrested were acting at the direction and control of a Chinese government official and deleted cell phone communications with the official after learning of the FBI investigation.

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“This is a flagrant violation of our national sovereignty,” Michael Driscoll, head of the FBI field office in New York, said at a news conference.

The two men, Jianwang “Harry” Lu, 61, of the Bronx, and Jinping Chen, 59, of Manhattan, both U.S. citizens, were arrested Monday morning at their home.

Lu’s attorney, Deirdre Vondornum, declined to comment. An email seeking comment was left with Chen’s lawyer.

The men were never registered with the Justice Department as agents of a foreign government, U.S. law enforcement officials said. While the Secret Police did provide some basic services, such as helping Chinese citizens renew their Chinese driver’s licenses, it also had more “sinister” functions, including helping the Chinese government locate a Chinese-American democracy activist living in California. , the officials said.

“New York City is the best of New York: the NYPD,” U.S. Attorney Brian Peace, Brooklyn’s top federal prosecutor, said at a news conference announcing the arrests. “We don’t need and don’t want cities where our secret police are great.”

In recent years, Justice Department officials have prioritized prosecutions of so-called “transnational repression,” the efforts by foreign governments in the United States to identify, intimidate and silence dissidents.

A landmark case involving China was announced in 2020, when the Justice Department charged six people with a pressure campaign on behalf of the Chinese government aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing to return to China to face charges. In January, the Justice Department charged three men with allegedly orchestrating a conspiracy originating in Iran to kill an Iranian-American author and activist who had spoken out against human rights abuses in Iran.

“In the United States, the law protects us all from persecution, violence, and the threat of violence as authoritarian governments—whether it be the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran, or others—become more brazen in trampling the bedrock rights and freedoms Our democracy,” said David Newman, a senior official in the Justice Department’s national security division, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

In a separate plan announced Monday, the Justice Ministry accused 34 officials of the Ministry of Public Security of creating and using fake social media accounts to harass dissidents abroad. The defendants also used social media to spread Chinese government propaganda and attempted to recruit U.S. citizens to serve as Chinese agents, prosecutors said. All defendants remain at large and are believed to be living in China.

Separately, eight Chinese government officials believed to be currently living in China have been charged with instructing an employee of a U.S. telecommunications company to remove Chinese dissidents from the company’s platform, prosecutors announced Monday.

Julien Jin, a former Zoom executive based in China, is one of 10 people charged in the scheme. He was first charged in December 2020, when authorities accused him of trying to disrupt a series of Zoom meetings in May and June of that year to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

At the time, the executive served as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, regularly responding to Chinese government requests to end meetings and block users of the Zoom video communications platform, authorities said. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)