BEIJING - An exiled former leader of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement went on trial in southwestern China on Thursday on financial fraud charges after being extradited from Hong Kong, a human rights group reported.
No verdict was announced at the end of Zhou Yongjun's five-hour hearing in the Sichuan province city of Shehong, Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
A high-profile figure in the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Beijing that were crushed by the army, Zhou was sent to a mainland Chinese jail in September of last year after attempting to enter Hong Kong from the United States.
Supporters say he was planning on returning to mainland China to visit his elderly parents and accuse Hong Kong's government of violating its own laws in sending him to the mainland.
Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China in 1997, but the territory retains separate political, legal, economic and immigration systems from the mainland. It also lacks a deportation and removal treaty with mainland China.
The human rights group said authorities suspected him of attempting to access funds in a Hong Kong bank account that were frozen after the death of the leader of a meditation group, now banned in China, in a 2006 auto accident in the United States.
In its news release, the information center said Zhou had been carrying a fake Malaysian passport that matched a pseudonym used by the deceased leader of the meditation group at the time he was detained.
Officials at the Shehong court reached by phone refused to comment or give their names.
Messages left for one of Zhou's Hong Kong lawyers, Albert Ho, were not immediately returned.
Hong Kong's government refused to comment on Zhou's case. Visitors whose travel documents do not meet requirements are usually returned to their "place of embarkation or origin," the government said.
Zhou was a United States permanent resident on track to become a citizen, but did not ask to be returned to the U.S. because of an outstanding warrant issued there for his arrest, said the information center. It did not say why the warrant had been issued and its existence could not be confirmed.
The information center has a well-established reputation for accuracy in reporting on human rights violations and political developments in mainland China.
Zhou captured global attention in 1989 by kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People beside Tiananmen Square in a plea for China's communist leaders to acknowledge student calls for political reforms and an end to corruption.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are believed to have been killed in the Tiananmen Square crackdown, which the communist government has made off-limits for discussion. Many veterans of the movement who were not exiled continue to suffer government harassment.
