Thirty Police Came for a Reading Group in Chengdu on Friday Afternoon. They Took Eleven People, Most of Them Past Sixty, One of Them With a Single Lung. The Charge, When It Came, Was Ten Days for Preaching.

Eleven members of Early Rain Covenant Church sat down to read together in Chengdu at about three o'clock on Friday, September 11. Most of them were over sixty. Several were in their seventies. Two were in their fifties, and they were the young ones.

Officers from the Hongpailou police station in Wuhou District walked in and took all eleven. Weiquanwang, the Chinese rights monitor that reported the raid first, counts more than thirty officers. ChinaAid, which published its own account on Monday, says the group was meeting at a teahouse. Weiquanwang says it was a home. Nobody disputes the eleven, the station or the hour.

One of the eleven was He Futao. She is seventy three. Surgeons removed one of her lungs after cancer. She fainted not long ago and needed emergency treatment. Around midnight, according to church members keeping watch outside the station, an ambulance pulled up. They could not see who it was for. Police told the families the matter would be settled within twenty four hours and used the words "investigation into a cult." They said nothing else.

It was fifteen degrees Celsius in Chengdu that night. One church member talked the police into taking two warm coats inside. Then the families stood on the pavement and waited to learn what eleven old people reading together had done.