More than 50 arrested by Beijing police in anti-terror crackdown in six months
Police say 3, 300 bits of 'terrorist information' have been collected, along with 728 audio and video clips in nationwide campaign
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 09 October, 2014, 2:51pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 09 October, 2014, 6:56pm
Li Jing [email protected]
Beijing police say they have been monitoring more than 900 websites since last year for anti-terrorist information. Photo: AP
Beijing police arrested more than 50 suspects in the first half of the year for spreading terrorism information online, the Beijing Morning Post reported today.
Police gathered more than 3,300 items of online information deemed to involve terrorism and removed 728 audio and video clips spreading terrorist ideas as part of the nationwide anti-terror campaign, the report said.
From mid-June to mid-September, Beijing police said they had also received 9,500 criminal reports through an online platform, a 16.1 per cent drop compared with the same period last year.
The announcement came at an internal meeting on Wednesday in which Zhou Qiang, the president of the Supreme People’s Court, promised severe punishments for any terrorist crimes that threatened the nation’s stability, China News Service reported.
Zhou urged judges nationwide to crack down on terrorists, separatists and extremist forces when dealing with cases involving ethnic minorities, the report says.
Police also said they handled 1.3 million items of “harmful online information” during the same period after they started monitoring more than 900 websites last year.
Since setting up a special task force on internet security in 2011, police say they have arrested more than 30,800 suspects, the newspaper reported.
The suspects were involved with online defrauding, hacking and online rumour mongering, police said.
Some critics have said the crackdown on online speeches under the so-called anti-rumour campaign, which has led to the detention of several bloggers and columnists, has violated China’s tenet of freedom of speech.
