Foreign reporters were roughed up while trying to visit blind Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng this week by aggressive mobs apparently working for authorities, journalists said Wednesday.
Chen, a self-taught lawyer who gained world attention by exposing abuses in the "one-child" population control policy, has been under house arrest in east China since completing a jail term of more than four years in September.
"We were roughly pushed away from Chen's home" by about a dozen men, said Brice Pedroletti, a journalist with French newspaper Le Monde.
Stephane Lagarde, a journalist with Radio France Internationale, said thugs at Chen's village in Shandong province also seized the memory card of his digital recorder and his China reporter credentials.
One man threatened to hit him with a brick.
"These peasants from the area are recruited for this type of purpose and repelled us very forcefully," he said, adding that he was not beaten.
CNN aired a graphic clip showing a man in combat fatigues shoving its reporter away and then hurling rocks at the retreating TV crew.
The New York Times confirmed two of its staff were involved in an incident this week but declined to give further details.
"Our reporter and the photographer are safe and physically fine," said the spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha.
The incidents prompted a warning Wednesday from the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China to its members.
It said in a statement that "groups of violent, plainclothes thugs" had also damaged the vehicles of some media organisations and that police failed to come to their aid on at least one occasion.
"Since being told about the incidents, the police appear to have done nothing to rectify the situation or rein in these groups of thugs," it said.
A local police official, who gave only her surname, Gao, denied any organised operation to repel the press when contacted by AFP, saying: "Journalists are free to go and interview him (Chen)."
However, Chen's village of Dongshigu has been under virtual lockdown since his release last year, guarded by a round-the-clock team of police and plainclothes enforcers.
Diplomatic sources told AFP on Wednesday that representatives from the European Union, Switzerland and Canada had tried to visit Chen late last year but were rebuffed.
Chen last week released a daring, self-made video that he smuggled from his home. In the clip he rails against his "illegal" house arrest and the "hooligan methods" of local authorities.
After the video was made, both Chen and his wife Yuan Weijing were beaten by police, human rights activists have said.
A number of Chen's Chinese supporters who have attempted to reach him this week have also been severely beaten, US-based rights group ChinaAid said.
Chen gained fame — and angered authorities — by exposing widespread late-term abortions and forced sterilisations under China's "one child" policy.
He was arrested in 2006 and later convicted of "willfully harming public property" and "gathering masses to disturb traffic order" after a public rally by supporters.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton singled out Chen's case during a January speech in which she called on China's government to stop mistreating its domestic critics.
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