Saturday September 1, 1:12 PM

BEIJING, Sept 1 (AFP) - Five Chinese women, all detained for following the outlawed Falungong spiritual movement, have died in custody following torture by police, the group's New York-based headquarters said Saturday.

The women, who died in detention centers or police stations in five different provinces around China, were arrested simply for possessing or posting fliers about the government's persecution of Falungong members, the Falun Dafa Information Center said in a press release.

The center cited witness accounts saying the women were severely beaten before they died.

The deaths follow the lead of government directives issued in May to punish more severely anyone caught disseminating information on Falungong or the government's suppression of the group, the center said.

Police and detention center officials contacted by AFP either said they could not comment or did not know the person or incident reported.

One woman from the southern province of Fujian died after only three days in police custody, and witnesses reported her body had received a gaping wound in the waist, the size of a fist, the center said.

Police officials hurriedly cremated her body and prevented acquaintances from viewing the corpse. Her family was pressured not to disclose her death, it added.

Another woman's corpse was covered with wounds but authorities tried to dismiss her death as a suicide, the center said. She was imprisoned after police raided her home and found books about the semi-Buddhist sect.

Police also tried to explain the death of a woman from the northern province of Jilin as suicide, alleging she jumped off a building, the center said. However a witness reported seeing what appeared to be a woman's corpse being thrown off a building.

A woman from northern Heilongjiang province died after two months of abuse at a detention center, where she was beaten unconscious several times but denied medical attention, the center also said.

And another woman from the northern province of Gansu appeared to have died from injuries sustained while being force fed, the center added. She had been on hunger strike and was beaten severely during her detention, it said.

Four of the five women died in August while the other died in July.

The deaths bring the total number of known cases of Falungong members who died in police custody to 272, the center said.

The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which has been independently verifying the reports, has been able to confirm 156 deaths so far.

Tens of thousands of Falunlong practitioners have been sent to "re-education through labor" centres since the Chinese government banned the group as an "[Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted]" in July 1999, while hundreds of practitioners have been given prison sentences.

Beijing considers Falungong a threat to social stability and a challenge to its authority.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010901/1/1dz6e.html