Thursday, Dec. 7, 2000; 10:21 a.m. EST

BEIJING -- Two more members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement have died in police custody, bringing to at least 74 the death toll in China's 17-month crackdown on Falun Gong, a human rights group said Thursday.

Wang Huachen, a 32-year-old chemical factory worker, died Nov. 18 in a hospital of injuries he got jumping out of a fourth-story window at a police station in the northeastern city of Huludao, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. Wang jumped after police allegedly beat him for two hours with wooden poles on Nov. 7, the day they arrested him for refusing to leave Falun Gong, the Hong Kong-based center said.

Zhao Jing, 19, was arrested Nov. 23 on a train in the northern province of Hebei while traveling to Beijing with other Falun Gong followers, the center said. Three days later, police notified her family she was dead. Police said she died after falling in an escape attempt, but her companions said they heard her cries as police beat her, the center said.

Police in both locations refused to comment. Chinese officials have declined to discuss individual reports of police abuse but deny that any followers have died from mistreatment. The center says at least 74 followers have died in detention since China banned the group in July 1999, but Falun Gong says the number is much higher.

Falun Gong attracted millions of members in the 1990s with its health exercises and eclectic mix of Taoism, Buddhism and the ideas of its founder, former government clerk Li Hongzhi, now believed to be in the United States. China outlawed Falun Gong [...]. Communist Party leaders apparently fear the group's size and organization could challenge their monopoly on power.

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