“Clandestine police station” in the middle of New York, cyberbullying: American justice raised its tone on Monday April 17 by announcing two arrests in New York and dozens of charges against Chinese security officials.
These cases “further illustrate the extent of the efforts made by the Chinese state to extend its authoritarian vision of the world to the inhabitants of this city”, New York, and “of this country”, the United States, underlined the prosecutor Brooklyn Federal, Breon Peace, at a press conference with representatives of the Federal Police (FBI) and the Department of Justice.
Three separate surveys
Authorities detailed the developments of three separate investigations. In a first case, two suspects, US citizens identified as Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, were arrested Monday at their home in New York, under suspicion of having participated in the operations of a “post underground police station in the heart of Chinatown on Manhattan Island. They were also charged with destroying evidence.
According to the Brooklyn prosecutor, the premises, closed by the FBI in the fall of 2022, occupied “an entire floor” of an “innocuous office building”. They offered both administrative services to the Chinese community, such as driving license renewals, but the two suspects would have acted on orders from Beijing and in a more secret way to monitor and put pressure on opponents, according to American justice.
“On at least one occasion, a Chinese National Police official asked one of the defendants, a US citizen, to help locate a Chinese-born pro-democracy activist living in California,” Breon Peace described. . The presence of this type of clandestine antenna has been denounced in other Western countries, such as Canada, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, and fuels accusations of espionage against Beijing, which denies them.
“Troll Farm”
In a separate investigation, 34 Chinese “Ministry of Public Security officials”, aged between 26 and 52, all believed to be residing in their country, are now facing charges for cyber-harassment activities of pro-activists. democracy and “dissidents” outside Chinese borders, “especially here in New York”, announced the Brooklyn prosecutor.
Referred to by US authorities as the “912” group, this Chinese “elite police team” has “an internet troll farm, creating thousands of fake online accounts which they use to harass, denigrate and threaten dissidents and activists around the world,” Breon Peace described.
Finally, six other agents of the Ministry of Public Security and “two members of the Chinese cyberspace administration” have been charged in a case uncovered in 2020, in which a Chinese employee of the Zoom company acted to disrupt meetings. activists online, especially to commemorate the bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
In this case, the American justice issued a new indictment indicating that the employee, Julien Jin, “worked directly under the orders” of the Chinese authorities, to identify the activists who participated in these meetings.
Tight relationships
In recent months, relations on the subject between the United States and its great rival have been further strained with the destruction in February of a Chinese balloon flying over the American sky and considered a spy by Washington.
The United States is also threatening to close the TikTok application, owned by the Chinese group ByteDance and very popular with young Americans, but accused of allowing Beijing to spy on and manipulate its users.
With AFP
