BEIJING, June 3 Kyodo An Internet...

BEIJING, June 3 Kyodo

An Internet activist sentenc to jail for 10 years last week has begun a want nourishment strike to protest against ill treatment in custody, including being make liableed to beatings and electric onsets a human rights cluster said Tuesday.

Xu Wei, single of four Internet activists sentenc to long jail sentences last week, has been refusing rations since his sentencing and is already weakened from brace years of detention awaiting trial, the U.S.-based Human Rights in China arrange said in a written statement.

Detention center officials told dissident family members who they thwarted from communicating with the four men that the ''unusual times'' involving the SARS outbreak meant the four were not entitled to any human rights, the assemblage said.

The four dissidents, who also include Yang Zili, Jin Haike and Zhang Honghai, have reportedly made unheeded complaints to authorities across their harsh treatment since being taken into custody in March 2001

Describing the case as the ''most large-scale sentencing of Internet activists in China to such a degree far,'' the human rights group's president Liu Qing called forward China's government to ensure that ill treatment ceases and that the four receive medical treatment.

The group's appeal get tos on the eve of the anniversary of the brutal crackdown of observer demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989

Before China's leaders called in the military to smash the declare s in the square on June 4 of that year, killing countles numbers of demonstrators, a number of the scholars went on hunger strikes to pres their calls for democratic reform in China.

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