More than 700 armed policemen fired into a large crowd of protesting farmers during a bloody confrontation in Hanyuan, a village in Sichuan Province on November 6. Seventeen farmers were killed and forty wounded, a rights activist in Beijing told The Epoch Times.

The farmers were protesting their forced relocation by the government to build a power station in Sichuan.

The activist, who was on a phone call with the farmers during the shooting, reported that police began rounding up the farmers around 6 p.m. and started to shoot into the crowd around 10 p.m. that night.

“Right from the beginning of the call up until about 10 p.m., we heard gun shots and their crying. Our hearts were broken,” said the activist. The scene was described as “bloody” and “gruesome.”

Earlier in the day, state media reported that Luo Gan, the security chief from the central government, had flown in, raising hopes among the farmers that the government would listen to their grievances. It turned out that Luo was likely overseeing the crackdown on the farmers.

The local government has denied that there were any large groups of armed police, shootings, confrontations or casualties in Hanyuan after inquiries by journalists.

They alleged that the farmers’ grievances had been resolved on Friday, November 5 and everything was back to business as usual on Saturday. When asked how they had resolved the farmers’ specific problems, they refused to comment and hung up.

On most Chinese websites, any news or reference about the Hanyuan incident was quickly deleted after they were posted online.

According to reports from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the origin of the conflict is the Hanyuan government’s forced relocation of 100,000 residents to build Pubugou Power Station, a hydroelectric power plant. The mass relocation has sparked protests involving tens of thousands in Sichuan Province.