Two New Yorkers Charged Over Backdoor Chinese Police Station

An FBI announcement made Monday revealed that two residents of New York were arrested and charged on accusations of running a secret police station on behalf of Communist China.

Fox News reported that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York is accusing Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping of conspiring to act as agents of China’s government.

Both men were U.S. citizens working under the command of China and reportedly set up a building that offered basic services for Chinese citizens, including driver’s license renewals. It also tracked and went after Chinese dissidents living in the U.S.

The U.S. Justice Department additionally filed charges for 34 officers in the Ministry of Public Security on Monday for allegedly starting and utilizing thousands of phony social media accounts on Twitter and other social media giants to bully dissidents online.

The overseas police station is said to have operated in Manhattan’s Chinatown:

A lawyer from New York’s eastern office, Breon Peace, charged that China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) “has repeatedly and flagrantly violated our nation’s sovereignty, including by opening and operating a police station in the middle of New York City.”

“Two miles from our office, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in Lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police,” Peace explained. “Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable.”

There was a similar occurrence last year when five foreign nationals were charged with stalking, harassing, and spying on a U.S. resident on behalf of Chinese Communist Party-affiliated secret police, according to Fox News.

The Chinese government has denied the allegations of its overseas backdoor police station, characterizing accusations by the U.S. on the matter as “groundless.”

Meanwhile, The Department of Justice (DOJ) has warned that this now-busted plan is a “significant national security matter.”

These events come as tensions between Washington and Beijing continuously increase. It was only just a couple of months ago when a Chinese spy balloon was seen traversing across the U.S. and later determined to have collected intel from numerous American military sites before being destroyed.