Several hundred supporters of the meditation movement...

Several hundred supporters of the meditation movement Falun Gong protested against Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to Germany in Berlin. At a demonstration on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, about 300 Falun Gong supporters called for the release of 30,000 supporters of the movement imprisoned in China. Moreover, the demonstrators called for the rescinding of the execution order under which about 400 supporters of the Falun Gong movement have lost their lives since the beginning of persecution in China.
The German branch of Falun Gong has about 2,000 supporters, half of whom are Chinese, while the other half are Germans, stated Peter Recknagel, member of the executive committee of the German Falun Gong movement. He stressed that the Chinese authorities were discriminating against the meditation movement by calling it "a sect".