DETROIT -- An American follower of the
Falun Gong sect who was detained in Beijing returned to the United States on
Saturday, saying he had been questioned and threatened before he was
deported.
Jason Pomerleau, 25, said it was only because of nationality that he and his
Canadian girlfriend, Christine Loftus, 22, were freed without much harm.
"If we had been Chinese, we would have been beaten severely,"
Pomerleau said from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, where he arrived on a flight
from Beijing and waited for a connecting flight to Boston. "We are very,
very lucky."
His brother, Daniel Pomerleau, a student at Clark University in Worcester,
Mass., had been arrested on Wednesday while passing out Falun Gong literature
and was deported the same day.
Jason Pomerleau said he and Loftus planned to distribute Falun Gong materials
at an electronics market on Thursday.
"We were getting on the bus, when somebody in plainclothes grabbed
us," Pomerleau said. "Immediately my reaction was 'We haven't done
anything wrong. We haven't committed any crime.' "
He said they were questioned together, then separated later that night.
Pomerleau, a laboratory technician at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, said
there was much "pushing and shoving" and he was threatened.
Loftus, a student at Brock University in St. Catherine's,
Ontario, was released Friday night, he said.
China outlawed Falun Gong in 1999, calling it an "evil cult" that
leads followers to their deaths by driving them insane or telling them to
refuse modern medicine.
The group claims it seeks only to promote good health and moral living with its
regime of traditional Chinese exercises, meditation and beliefs based on
Taoism, Buddhism and the ideas of its founder, Li Hongzhi.