A blind Chinese dissident has escaped house arrest and gone into hiding, rights campaigners say.
Chen Guangcheng slipped out of his usually well-guarded house in Dongshigu village in Shandong province on Sunday.
He Peirong, who has led a campaign for Mr Chen’s freedom, said she picked him up and drove him to “a relatively safe place”.
Mr Chen’s freedom would be a boost for a persecuted dissident community that has seen repression increase over the past two years.
His plight under house arrest has been closely monitored by Western governments and by local activists, who have seen Mr Chen - a self-taught lawyer who was blinded by a fever in infancy - as an inspiring, determined fighter for justice.
“His mental state is pretty good. He’s alive, but whether he’s safe I don’t know,” He said from her home city of Nanjing.
She said she left Mr Chen a few days ago. She said state security agents had begun a full-scale search by yesterday.
“There’s absolutely no guarantee for his safety,” she said. She denied an online report that Mr Chen entered the US embassy in Beijing last night.
The embassy would not comment and referred queries to the state department. Local Chinese officials could not be reached for comment, the phone lines in Dongshigu having seemingly been disconnected.
Word of Mr Chen’s escape apparently angered local officials, who began searching homes in Dongshigu looking for him, activists said.
They said Zhang Jian, chief of the town that oversees Dongshigu, led others to Mr Chen’s brother’s home, then climbed over a wall surrounding the house to go after the family.
“Zhang Jian found out Chen was gone. He was furious,” He said. “They beat all the family who were at the home.” She said Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, “took a cleaver for self-defence. He said he hacked several people with the cleaver and wounded them.”
Activist Bob Fu said Chen Kegui and his father, Chen Guangfu, had been detained by paramilitary police armed with electric shock batons. Troops had surrounded the family compound in Dongshigu and were reventing Chen Kegui’s ill six-year-old son from being taken to hospital.
Chen Guangcheng served four years in prison for exposing forced abortions and sterilisations in his and surrounding villages. Since his release in September 2010, local officials kept him confined to his home, despite the lack of legal grounds for doing so.
Surveillance cameras were trained on his house, and checkpoints were set up around the village.
Locals paid to keep outsiders away chased off, scuffled with and sometimes threw stones at foreign reporters, civil rights lawyers and activists, including Hollywood actor Christian Bale.
At times, officials stormed Mr Chen’s home and beat him up. One beating that left him unconscious was in apparent retaliation for a video recording, later smuggled out, in which he compared his house arrest to being in “a bigger jail” than the prison where he had been held.