Police video of lawyer’s arrest raises questions

BEIJING: Chinese authorities appear to be mounting a smear campaign against a detained human rights lawyer by releasing a seemingly edited police video which shows him resisting arrest and then swinging at an officer, campaigners say.

Yu Wensheng was seized Friday by roughly a dozen police, including a SWAT team, as he left his Beijing apartment to walk his child to school, sources said.

Yu, best known for suing the Beijing government over the city’s once chronic pollution, has been a persistent voice for reform despite an increasingly severe crackdown on activism under President Xi Jinping.

The video, taken by a police body cam and published Tuesday by state media outlet The Paper, showed police surrounding the 50-year-old on a street before dawn and telling him he was to be detained for ‘provoking trouble’.

Yu’s 13-year-old son – who had run back home to tell his mother what happened, according to defence lawyer Huang Hanzhong – did not appear in the video. In the footage Yu repeatedly tells officers ‘I will not obey,’ then throws a right hook at an officer before being subdued, though it is unclear if he landed the punch.

The video appears to be edited: time stamps jump back and forth at several points.

“An unedited video is not available so it’s hard to say what happened, but it looked like it was taken during Yu’s arrest,” Huang told AFP.

The video appears to show that police did not present Yu with a written summons notice, Huang said, a possible violation of Chinese law. Police appeared to be trying to provoke him by deploying three cars and a dozen officers, he said. They have not allowed Yu to meet his lawyer or family since his arrest.

Shortly before his detention, Yu had circulated an open letter calling for five reforms to China’s constitution, including multicandidate presidential elections.

He was charged with disrupting a public service, according to a detention order seen by AFP.