Chinese police have arrested a US-based Chinese businessman and kept him incommunicado despite a potentially life-threatening medical condition, the man's lawyer said Tuesday.
The arrest, reported by Jerome Cohen, a prominent expert on Chinese law, is one of a string of detentions of US residents and citizens by Chinese police that have helped sour relations between Washington and Beijing.
Police detained Liu Yaping in Inner Mongolia on March 8 initially on suspicion of committing commercial fraud but later in connection with "state secrets," said Cohen, a law professor at New York University who has been retained by Liu's family.
"Today is the 61st day of his detention without access to anyone else except the hospitals to which he is taken on various occasions for emergency treatment," Cohen told reporters.
"He was a healthy person when he went into detention."
Liu was suffering from a potentially life-threatening brain aneurysm, said Cohen, who has tried in vain to gain access to his client through local lawyers from Inner Mongolia and Beijing.
China has also detained four ethnic Chinese academics -- two American citizens and two permanent US residents -- prompting the State Department to warn critics of Beijing they may risk detention in China.
The detentions have added to tensions in China-US ties over US arms sales to Taiwan and a collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter.
China has formally charged one US resident, Gao Zhan, with espionage and is investigating the other US resident and one of the American citizens on suspicion of spying or leaking state secrets.
Police had initially accused Liu of tax evasion but then dropped that charge and said he had filed a false report in connection with setting up a joint venture, Cohen said.
After eight weeks in detention, police said Liu's case was exceptional because it involved "state secrets," but did not elaborate, he said.
"This man was locked up for a reason unrelated to the charges," said Cohen.
"You can't just arrest somebody or detain them and then start asking them questions in an effort to justify what you've done."
Liu's wife had written a letter to Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji to try to persuade him to take up the case, Cohen said.
Cohen, who is also acting for Gao, accused police of violating China's criminal procedural law by detaining his clients for several weeks without an arrest warrant and refusing them access to a lawyer.
"This is a right of the detained person, no approval is necessary," Cohen told reporters.
"I'm not talking about their violating American law or European law or human rights standards of an international nature," he said. "I'm talking about Chinese criminal justice."
Under the Criminal Procedure Law, police can detain a suspect for 14 days, or 30 days if the case involves cooperation with others, after which they must either release them or get an arrest warrant, he said.
But the Ministry of State Security, China's secret police, automatically detained people for 30 days and frequently used a provision allowing "supervised residence" -- or house arrest -- for up to six months, he said – BEIJING (Reuters)
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