BRING TED HOME!
American Green Beret Vet TED MAHER
Held HOSTAGE by Monaco for 569 Days (Thread 6)
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Posted on 09/07/2001 2:20:19 PM PDT by tallhappy
BEIJING, Sept. 7 — A 66-year-old naturalized American citizen has been imprisoned here for the last 18 months on suspicion of gathering state secrets, his relatives and American officials revealed today.
In violation of Chinese legal procedure, the man — Fong Fuming an electrical engineer from West Orange, N.J. — has still not been formally indicted. And for most of his incarceration, his family says, Mr. Fong has been subjected to a gratuitous torment: he has been deprived of his badly needed eyeglasses and hearing aid.
The case of Mr. Fong is the latest of several involving the arrest of Chinese-born Americans here on vague and puzzling security grounds.
After 18 months of silence and vain hope that the case would be resolved, Mr. Fong's wife and children are taking his case to Congress and the public, and it threatens to become a new irritant in Chinese-American relations just as President Bush prepares for his first visit here next month.
Beijing leaders are anxious to strengthen ties with the United States, which they see as vital to China's modernization.
Mr. Fong's wife and two sons say they he is innocent of the charges, which involve technical documents Mr. Fong had assembled in his laptop computer as a consultant to an American power company. The company, which the family declined to name, was bidding for a contract in a World Bank-financed power transmission project, a bid that it won despite Mr. Fong's arrest.
To the dismay of Mr. Fong's relatives and lawyers, he has still not been formally charged as the investigation has languished beyond legal limits.
"The Chinese have blatantly violated their own criminal procedure law," said Jerome Cohen, a lawyer in New York who is advising the man's family. Mr. Fong was formally arrested, but not specifically charged, in September 2000. By law he should have been indicted or released within seven months, Mr. Cohen said.
"They haven't been able to come up with any plausible rationale for holding him 18 months without an indictment," said Mr. Cohen, a law professor at New York University who has advised several other Chinese-born citizens and green-card holders who were arrested here on security grounds.
In some well-publicized earlier cases, Chinese authorities secretly tried and convicted the individuals, then deported them, relieving the diplomatic pressure from Washington.
The American Embassy confirmed today that Mr. Fong was in detention and had been visited by consular officers, who have recently been able to deliver needed medications. But they said that until Mr. Fong signs a privacy waiver they cannot discuss details of his case.
Mr. Fong was a senior power official in Zhejiang Province before he moved to the United States in the late 1980's to become a consultant, and became an American citizen in 1994.
He was initially arrested on suspicion of bribery to obtain confidential information, but security agents soon decided to regard the documents in his computer as state secrets and Mr. Fong has been held in a Beijing detention center of the Ministry of State Security, which handles sensitive spy cases.
According to a statement issued by his family today, none of the documents were marked as secret and most were widely available.
Mr. Fong is extremely near-sighted and hard of hearing, his family said, but for most of the last year, for unexplained reasons, he was not allowed to wear his glasses, making it impossible for him to read. He is still being denied use of his hearing aid.
When his belatedly allowed Chinese lawyer tries to speak with him, through a glass partition, Mr. Fong has had great trouble hearing him, Mr. Cohen said today.
How many are we going to stand for?
BRING TED HOME!
American Green Beret Vet TED MAHER
Held HOSTAGE by Monaco for 569 Days (Thread 6)
Ted Maher's Webpage
Give Ted a word of encouragement -
Send the Webmaster an email to forward to Ted.
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