Chinese police assault fellow officer 'they mistook for prostitute'
Police in central China have been forced to apologise after allegedly assaulting a fellow cop they "mistook" for a prostitute.
The incident underlined the harsh treatment often meted out to Chinese sex workers Photo: GETTY
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai
11:27AM BST 07 Jun 2013
In an incident that underlined the harsh treatment often meted out to Chinese sex workers, a 53-year-old female police officer was "punched in the face" and "dragged" from a hotel room during a botched anti-vice operation, according to local reports.
The officer, named only as Ms Wang, told a local newspaper she had been visiting her daughter in the city of Zhengzhou, in Henan province, when police unexpectedly appeared at the door of her hotel room.
"I looked through the magic eye and saw someone wearing a police uniform. I then opened the door and seven or eight men came in," she told Henan's Dahe Daily newspaper.
The intruders punched her in the head, "without saying a word", the police officer added.
Ms Wang said she told the men she was also a member of the police. "You got it wrong. I am police too." But her pleas fell on deaf ears. She was detained and only released from the police station at around 2am.
The female officer had been "violently mistreated", the Henan Business Daily claimed.
On Thursday, local police issued an online apology.
"We would again like to express our sincere apologies to the mother and daughter," an official wrote on the police's Twitter-like Weibo account.
A report released last month by Human Rights Watch claimed China's estimated six million sex workers were routinely subjected by police to "torture, beatings, physical assaults [and] arbitrary detentions." One Beijing-based sex worker quoted in the report said: "Once when I was soliciting on the street, the police just came and started beating me up ... There were five or six of them, they just beat me to a pulp."
