HONG KONG, Jan. 20 -- Zhou Yongjun, a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests who was in 2008 handed over to mainland police by Hong Kong authorities after arriving here, was imprisoned for attempted fraud, local media and a human rights group said Wednesday.
The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said Zhou's mainland lawyer confirmed that Zhou, 42, was on Friday last week sentenced to nine years in prison for ''attempted financial fraud'' in central China's Sichuan Province.
Zhou was also fined 80,000 yuan (about $11,700), and his lawyer has confirmed that Zhou plans to appeal the ruling, the Hong Kong-based center said.
In a November trial, Zhou was indicted for trying to defraud Hong Kong's Hang Seng Bank of HK$6 million (about $774,000) from two accounts registered under the name of Wang Xingxiang.
Zhou used a Malaysian passport under Wang's name when entering Hong Kong in 2008 on route to visit his sick father in mainland China, his companion earlier said in Hong Kong.
Arriving at the Hong Kong airport from Macao in September that year, Zhou was detained by Hong Kong police on a fraud allegation.
The police later cleared Zhou of the fraud allegation and turned him over to the Immigration Department, which allegedly handed him over to Chinese authorities.
Hong Kong's Cable TV said Albert Ho, Hong Kong's Democratic Party chairman who helps Zhou in seeking proof that Hong Kong authorities falsely handed him over to the mainland, described the conviction as ''political.''
''The Hong Kong government has yet to release any information over the way Zhou was handled,'' Ho told reporters. ''These documents could be useful in Zhou's defense. This is abnormal, (Zhou's conviction) has political motives.''
Hong Kong, the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997, has an independent judicial system under the Basic Law, the city's mini-Constitution, and it does not have a deportation and removal agreement with Beijing.
Ho has said that if the Immigration Department did hand Zhou to China, ''it will be a very, very serious violation of the Basic Law and the 'one country, two systems' principle promised by Beijing.''
Leading the Tiananmen protest that ended in a bloody military crackdown two decades ago, Zhou was arrested in 1990 on ''counter-revolutionary'' charges and released without prosecution the following year.
He fled to the United States via Hong Kong in 1992.
Having illegally entered China via Hong Kong in 1998, Zhou was detained in Guangzhou for half a year when police questioned his political activities in the United States.
He was then sentenced to three years in labor camp for illegal border-crossing.
Zhou returned to the United States in 2002 and stayed there until trying to visit his parents in China in 2008.
The Hong Kong authorities have declined to comment on individual cases regarding immigration policies.
==Kyodo