(Clearwisdom.net) According to news from the Minghui website (Chinese version of Clearwisdom), (http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/4/25/177176.html), on April 19 at 4 p.m., Mr. Yu Ping and his wife were arrested by seven police officers from Guan Zhuang Police Station. Mr Yu Ping, a PhD student from Tsinghua University, lived in the Zhoujiajing Residential Quarter, Guan Zhuang, Chaoyang District, Beijing, with his wife, Ms. Zhao Yumin. Their house was broken into and ransacked by the police. They are currently being held at Qiliqu Police Station in Dongcheng District. Other Falun Dafa practitioners who were arrested at the same time included Ms. Guo Li, Ms. Jin Yulan, Ms. Zhao Jingmin, and Mr. Yu Ping's mother.

I was a classmate of Mr. Yu Ping. We practiced Falun Dafa together at a practice site before the persecution began on July 20, 1999. Mr. Yu was a graduate student in the Department of Thermal Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1995. In March 1997, he was admitted into the PhD. program earlier than usual due to his outstanding performance. He was awarded the "January 29th Scholarship" and the "Siemens Scholarship" at Tsinghua University. He was the chairman of the Graduate Student Union of the department, as well as the deputy team leader of the Graduate Student Work Team. Mr. Yu's presentation of his graduation thesis in early June 2000 was unanimously approved, and his thesis was praised as an outstanding graduation thesis. Because he went to Tiananmen Square to appeal for justice for Falun Gong on June 20, 2000, his degree was withheld and not granted. Instead he was granted a certificate certifying that he studied as a PhD student. Mr. Yu received a full scholarship from Ohio State University in the US, but he lost his opportunity to study there because he was illegally sentenced to four years in prison and held in the notorious Seventh Division of the Beijing Police Department and Beijing Qianjin Prison (also called Tianjin Chadian Prison) because he dared to clarify the truth about Falun Gong.

Mr. Yu Ping's wife, Ms. Zhao Yumin, was also illegally sentenced. She was held in Beijing Women's Prison. Both of them suffered all kinds of torture. There is no one to take care of their baby, who is not yet two years old.

The arrests of Mr. Yu Ping and his wife, as well as other practitioners, is yet more evidence that Chinese Communist Party officials are intensifying their persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in the lead up to the Olympics. At 5 o'clock in the afternoon on April 20, the day after Mr. Yu and his wife were arrested, practitioner Ms. Zhang Lianying; her husband, Mr. Niu Jinping; and their four-year-old daughter from Chaoyang District were arrested by several plainclothes police officers. More than a dozen police officers broke in and ransacked their home. They stole one computer, one movable hard drive, one MP4 player, and three big bags of Falun Dafa books.