Atlanta – Peter Yuan Li was beaten, tied up, blindfolded with duct tape and robbed of two laptop computers last week by three Asian men who burst into his suburban Atlanta home with a gun and knife.
He and other Chinese-Americans suspect it was no ordinary robbery.
Li, who works for a newspaper and website critical of the Chinese Communist Party, is one of several people tied to China’s banned Falun Gong spiritual movement who say they have been harassed and hit with break-ins in the United States by Chinese agents.
They say China has carried its crackdown on dissidents to this country.
FBI spokesman Stephen Emmett said the bureau is looking into the attack on Li for potential civil-rights violations and refused to comment on whether the Chinese government was behind it.
The men who broke into Li’s home near Duluth spoke Korean and Mandarin and left behind certain valuables, including a camcorder and television, but took his computers, a phone and his wallet, according to Li and the Fulton County police report.
“What surprises me is that in the U.S. they could do such things,” said Li, a naturalized U.S. citizen who does computer work for the website of the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper The Epoch Times. He now has stitches across his forehead.
Fulton County Detective Gerald Hightower said there is no evidence supporting Li’s claim that the attackers were sent by the Chinese government “to send a message to him,” but the incident is still under investigation.
Asked about the beating, a man who answered the telephone at the Chinese Embassy in Washington but declined to give his name criticized The Epoch Times as “a propaganda machine of the evil cult” and then said he knew nothing about the attack on Li.
