A second Chinese defector has backed claims China has spies operating in Australia.
Hao
Feng Jun, 32, who says he worked as a security officer in Tianjin in China’s north,
says China has a large spy network operating overseas.
“They spend
out businessmen and students out to overseas countries as spies,” he told
the ABC’s Lateline program through a translator.
Mr Hao applied for political
asylum in February while in Australia as a tourist and he says he is currently
on a bridging visa, the program reported.
“If I go back to China, there’s
no doubt the communist government will certainly persecute me. They know I have
confidential information – some of it top secret – and I’ll be severely punished,”
he said.
Mr Hao says he worked for the local branch of a security service
known as 6-10, set up specifically to wipe out the religious group, Falun Gong.
“Back
in China I worked in the 6-10 office and every day a lot of time was dealing with
the reports that were being sent in from overseas,” he told the program.
“They’d
send all this intelligence information through from Australia, from North America,
Canada and other countries and are reported back to the National Security Bureau,
but also the Public Security Bureau.
“They’d sent back lots of information,”
Mr Hao said.
His bureau in Tianjin received money from the Chinese government,
which was used to pay for spies to gather information about Falun Gong and other
dissident groups, as well as military and business groups.
Mr Hao said he
believed Former Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin’s claims there is a 1000-strong
spy network operating in Australia.
“I worked in the police office
in the security bureau and I believe that what Mr Chen says is true.”
Mr
Hao said he has seen evidence spies infiltrate groups like Falun Gong overseas
and collect information on their members to be sent back to China.
He said
he started out as a policeman before being transferred to the security service
known as 6-10, but left because he saw evidence of torture by his colleagues.
“I
had to go to the place where they’d detained a Falun Gong follower … When we
got there she had two huge black bruises on her back and two cuts on her back
about 20 centimetres long.
“One policeman was using a half-metre length
of metal bar to beat her. When I saw this I knew I couldn’t do this work,”
he said.
Mr Hao’s statements come after days of intense media coverage of
Mr Chen’s case.
The 37-year-old is in hiding after abandoning his job as
first secretary at the Chinese consulate-general in Sydney on May 26, saying he
faces persecution if he returns home after his four-year posting in Australia.
He
says China has a spy network operating here, a claim Beijing flatly rejects.
But
there are now calls for an inquiry into the immigration department’s handling
of Mr Chen’s application for asylum.
AAP
Posting date: 8/Jun/2005
Original
article date: 8/Jun/2005
Category: Media Report
