BEIJING: Chinese police blocked the gate of a cemetery holding the remains of victims of the Tiananmen crackdown on its 24th anniversary yesterday ahead of a vigil expected to see 150,000 people gather in Hong Kong.
Authorities launch a major push every June 4 to prevent discussion of the violently crushed 1989 pro-democracy protests, China’s most widely condemned human rights stain in recent decades, in which at least hundreds of people died.
In Beijing, more than a dozen security officials were deployed outside the stone gate at the Wanan graveyard in the west of the city, which members of the Tiananmen Mothers, a victims’ relatives group, visit each year.
People were expected to flood into Hong Kong’s Victoria Park yesterday for an annual vigil which is also a forum for protest over Chinese interference in the city’s affairs, amid fears it could lose freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland.
S Korea defends ‘guides’ of North
SEOUL: South Korea yesterday rejected charges by the Lao government that two of its nationals, arrested with nine North Korean refugees who were later forcibly repatriated, were human traffickers.
The nine refugees, aged between 14 and 18, were arrested in Laos on May 10 for illegal entry and were eventually returned to North Korea via China.
The Lao foreign ministry said two South Koreans accompanying the refugees were detained for alleged human trafficking and later handed over to the South’s embassy in Vientiane.
“It is not true that the (South Korean) guides of the North Korean defectors were involved in human trafficking,” Seoul’s foreign ministry spokesman Cho Tai-Young said. AFP
