Two men have been arrested for allegedly operating a Chinese "secret police station," US prosecutors said on Monday.

The center was allegedly located in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood.

The two New York residents face charges of conspiring to act as agents of China's government without informing US authorities, as well as obstruction of justice.

"This prosecution reveals the Chinese government's flagrant violation of our nation's sovereignty by establishing a secret police station in the middle of New York City," Breon Peace, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said.

"We don't need or want a secret police station in our great city," he said.

In response, China's Foreign Ministry rejected the prosecutor's statement, saying that such secret police stations did not exist and that China maintains a policy of non-interference in other countries. 

"China firmly opposes the US side's slandering, smearing, engaging in political manipulation, and maliciously concocting the so-called transnational repression narrative," ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.

'Transnational repressions schemes' against Chinese expats

Prosecutors said one of the two men sought to persuade an individual considered a fugitive from China to return home. The individual had reported being harassed and threatened.

China's government in 2022 asked the alleged agent to help locate a California resident who was considered a pro-democracy activist, prosecutors said.

According to prosecutors, the pair had admitted to the FBI that they deleted communications with the Chinese government after they found out they were under investigation.

Also on Monday, prosecutors separately charged 34 Chinese security officials for a campaign to monitor and harass dissidents living in the US. 

Brooklyn's top federal prosecutor said that the charges pertained to "transnational repression schemes targeting members of the Chinese diaspora community in New York City and elsewhere in the United States."

FBI chief worried about secret surveillance stations

Federal prosecutors had previously charged more than a dozen citizens of China and other countries with waging surveillance and harassment campaigns against dissidents living in the US.

In November 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a US Senate committee that he was "very concerned" about the presence of secret surveillance stations in US cities. He said that Beijing had violated the US' sovereignty in setting up a secret police presence.

The US is not the only country to have reported the presence of illegal Chinese police stations on its territory. Late last year, the Netherlands said that it had launched an investigation into two alleged overseas Chinese law enforcement centers in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

In September of last year, Spain-based human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders reported that Beijing had set up overseas police "service stations" in "dozens of countries across five continents."

sdi/dj (Reuters, AP, AFP)