Third Chinese defector in Australia says lawyer

SYDNEY - A third Chinese official has defected to Australia and has already been granted asylum, his lawyer said on Thursday, as a diplomat and a man claiming to be a former state security officer appealed to be allowed to stay.

The lawyer spoke on Australia's ABC television just hours after a senior cabinet minister had said the diplomat defector, a Sydney-based consul who says he fears for his family's safety if he is forced back to China, was in no danger of being sent home.

Chen Yonglin, the 37-year-old political affairs consul, has begged Australian authorities for political asylum, saying he would rather die than be shipped back to his homeland.

"Mr Chen is in Australia, he is being dealt with in accordance with the ordinary process of Australian immigration law and he is at no risk of being sent back to China," Health Minister Tony Abbott, a close ally of Prime Minister John Howard, told reporters.

Howard himself tried to calm concerns that Chen's fate might be influenced by Canberra's booming trade and economic ties with Beijing.

"Let me simply say that, just as in relation to the US, we have steadfastly refused to mix trade with politics and strategy and national security -- so it is in relation to China, and I'm sure that our Chinese friends will know that," Howard told a business lunch in Sydney.

Speaking on ABC's Lateline programme late on Thursday, lawyer Bernard Collaery said a senior Chinese police officer, who claims he witnessed state security agents beat a man to death in his police station, had been granted a protection visa by Australia.

Collaery said the "Gestapo" activities of a branch of the Chinese security service, known as 610, had horrified the man and convinced him to seek asylum in Australia.

"LAST STRAW"

"He hears the beating in his police station. He intervenes. He's told to go away. His conscience stricken, he comes back downstairs and says "This must stop'," Collaery said.

"And then sees this naked man with his head in a chair, his legs poking out, clearly deceased, and he's horrified by it. That's the last straw."

Collaery did not identify the man or say when he was granted asylum. There was no immediate government comment on the claim that a third Chinese had defected.

The second defector, Hao Fengjun, told ABC television earlier this week that he had worked as a state security officer for the 610 agency at its branch in Tianjin, northern China.

Hao is also seeking asylum and has backed claims by Chen that Beijing has a network of spies operating across Australia.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao called the men's assertions "fabricated and lies".

"Sino-Australia relations should not pay a price for two such people and two such incidents," he said.

China, which is Australia's third-largest trading partner with annual trade worth almost A$29 billion (more than $22 billion), is in talks with Canberra on a free trade deal and a separate pact to import Australian uranium.

Hao said he had travelled to Australia as a tourist in February and then applied for asylum. An Immigration Department spokeswoman would not confirm or deny Hao's application.

The department has said it is examining consul Chen's application for a protection visa, which is granted to asylum seekers under the U.N. Refugees Convention.

Chen has also applied to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for political asylum, but Downer has discouraged the application, urging Chen to pursue a protection visa instead.

Greens party leader Bob Brown said the Australian government was just trying not to offend China.

"I have no doubt ... (the government) feels it will be less of an affront to China if some other form of visa is offered," Brown told Australian radio.

Chen, who is in hiding with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, made his political asylum bid public on Saturday when he spoke at a Sydney rally to mark the anniversary of the Chinese army's crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.

- REUTERS