1st Ld-Writethru: Police smashes illegal organization jeopardizing China's national security

Chinese authorities announced on Tuesday they have smashed an illegal organization that sponsored activities jeopardizing China's national security.

The suspects, including a Swedish national, have been put under coercive measures in line with the criminal law.

According to a statement from Chinese police and national security authorities, the Swedish national, Peter Jesper Dahlin, and some other people have been operating an unregistered "China emergency rights aid group" on China's mainland, and had received undeclared money from overseas and carried out unregulated activities.

The police said the organization hired and trained others to gather, fabricate and distort information about China, providing "China's human rights report" to overseas organizations.

It also organized others to interfere with sensitive cases, deliberately aggravating disputes and instigating public-government confrontations to create mass incidents, according to the police.

The police said the organization had been accepting hugh sums of money from seven overseas organizations and the above activities were carried out in accordance with their plans.

Dahlin was also connected to Fengrui Law Firm, which police last year uncovered had organized paid protests.

Dahlin and Wang Quanzhang, a lawyer with Fengrui, co-founded "Joint Development Institute Limited" (JDI) in Hong Kong in August, 2009. JDI operated on the Chinese mainland under the name of "China emergency rights aid group".

Dahlin's organization also provided funds to Xing Qingxian, who had been accused of illegally assisting the son of Wang Yu, another Fengrui lawyer, to illegally cross the Chinese border.

Dahlin has confessed that all of the "China's human rights reports" were compiled via online research and could not reflect reality. "Not seeing some cases myself, I cannot guarantee they are true," he said.

The statement cited Dahlin's confession as saying that an unspecified foreign NGO had explicitly asked JDI to file no less than 96 lawsuits against the Chinese government each year.

The NGO also asked JDI to help train civil lawyers, each of whom would be paid 3,000 yuan (456 U.S. dollars) per month. While for practising lawyers like Wang, JDI would pay them 5,000 yuan and give them 20,000 yuan for every case against the Chinese government.

Two members of the organization said western anti-China forces had planted Dahlin and some other people in China to gather negative information for anti-China purposes such as smear campaigns.

The finger men are also tasked with organizing forces in China, fanning anti-government and anti-Party sentiment, and deceiving people to disrupt state and social order, thus, changing the social system of China, according to confessions of the two members.

The police have uncovered that the organization received nearly 10 million yuan from overseas in recent years, yet nearly half of this money was pocketed by Dahlin and his men through false salary receipts and other claims.

"If I give out salaries strictly according to the receipts, there will be no profits for me," he said.

Dahlin has expressed remorse, saying, "I need to offer my deep apologies for hurting the Chinese government and the Chinese people."

The Swedish national was detained on Jan. 3 over charges of funding activities threatening China's national security. He was later placed under residential surveillance. The police said his right to a consular visit was granted on Jan. 16, when Swedish diplomats met with him.

The case is under further investigation. Endi