FLUSHING, New York City—A woman with a group of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinatown says she was attacked by a man with a watermelon. Huiling Lu, a 46 year-old resident of New York's Chinatown, says the attack happened after she confronted a man handing out flyers slandering Falun Gong.
The man, who Lu says was about 20 years old and Chinese, was at the intersection of Market Street and E. Broadway when she approached him.
"I explained to him that it [slanderous information about Falun Gong] is not true," said Lu. "I told him Falun Gong is persecuted in China. I told him he was doing really bad things and you'll hurt a lot of people."
According to Lu and the several people who were with her, the leaflets claimed that Falun Gong incites people not to donate money to Sichuan earthquake relief and asks "over 2,000 Chinese organizations in greater New York to unite and demand the government to ban Falun Gong parades in New York's Chinatown."
According to Wailing Lam, a 62 year-old resident of Manhattan, there was also a child handing out the same flier earlier in the day.
"A child who was about 10 years old delivered the fliers on east Broadway," said Lam, who added that the boy was hiding behind a newspaper box and said his mother had given him the fliers to hand out.
After the Falun Gong practitioners approached the man and asked him to stop distributing the hate literature, they quickly found themselves besieged by twenty-plus pro-Communist people.
"Over 20 men came up to us and accosted us. They took our photographs. One man made a death threat,'" said Lu.
Lu, who tried to photograph the crowd for evidence, said one of the men in the group pulled her hair. Another man hit her on the head with a whole watermelon. The watermelon did not break, and Lu did not suffer any injury.
Another Falun Gong practitioner who was at the scene, Ms. Alan, said they believed the people distributing fliers were hired by the Chinese Communist Party.
"We approached him [man distributing fliers] to ask why he chose to do this. He replied, 'I am only doing a part-time job,'" said Alan.
The incident was reported to the New York Police Department's 5th Precinct in Chinatown.
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