BEIJING, Oct 31 (AFP) - Chinese police have arrested a man after his wife, a [practitioner] of the banned Falungong spiritual group, filed a legal complaint in the United States against Jiang Zemin, the wife said Thursday.

Cao Jianwei, 40, was taken away from his home in Beijing on October 25, his Australian-based wife Jennifer Zheng Zeng told AFP.

Four days beforehand, she had been among a group of Falungong practitioners who filed a lawsuit alleging rights abuses with the United Nations committees on torture and human rights, action timed to coincide with [the Chinese leader's] visit to the United States.

Zeng said her parents-in-law told her about her husband's arrest.

"My mother-in-law said the police searched our home and took our computer," she said from her home in Melbourne.

A family friend asked police about Cao's whereabouts Thursday, but officers in Beijing's Chongwen district police station, where Cao's "hukou" or household registration is kept, did not provide any information, she said.

Beijing police officials could not be reached for comment.

Zeng said she was one of seven plaintiffs from six countries who filed the action. When it was submitted, she was in Australia, where she has lived since September, and where she is applying for refugee status.

Zeng said her husband was not a Falungong follower and police probably detained him to find out if he was involved in the lawsuit, and also to send her a warning.

"Given that my husband is not a Falungong practitioner, I can imagine no other reason for his arrest except for the purpose to keep him as a hostage to threaten me. I would like to ask: If this is not terrorism, what is?" Zeng said separately in a statement released by the group.

Zeng, 36, had been detained several times in China for practicing Falungong. She was sentenced in May 2000 to one year in a labor camp, where she said she was prodded with electric batons until she nearly fainted and forced to squat for up to 15 hours in the burning sun.

She was later forced to sign a statement renouncing her beliefs in Falungong.

"I wanted to be part of the lawsuit because I felt I betrayed those practitioners still in jail by signing that statement. When I got out, I felt it was my duty to help them," she said in tears.

Cao is a former manager of a Beijing University education investment company.

Another lawsuit was filed against Jiang by [Falun Gong practitioners] in the US federal courts during the president's visit.

That seeks damages for the alleged persecution of the group's adherents in China, lawyers told reporters in Chicago.

Lawyers for Falungong have filed three similar suits in recent years against Chinese officials.

China banned the [Falun Gong] in 1999 and has since jailed or detained tens of thousands of practitioners.

http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/dd/Qchina-sect.RatO_COV.html