Chinese police said on Friday six members of a religious cult have been arrested over the beating death of a woman at a McDonald's restaurant in eastern China, according to The Associated Press.
The accused include four members of the same family, the AP reported. The six suspects allegedly attacked the woman in the city of Zhaoyuan in the Shandong province, a region known for religious cults, after she refused to tell one of them her phone number.
The same region gave birth to the violent anti-Christian Boxer movement that laid siege to Western interests in Beijing and elsewhere during the waning years of the Qing dynasty in 1900, according to the AP. China has struggled at times to control grassroots religious movements based on Christian or Buddhist ideology, like the Falungong meditation movement that attracted millions of adherents before being brutally repressed in 1999.
All-powerful spirit, or "Quannengshen" in Chinese, was founded in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang in the early 1990s and later spread to the country's eastern provinces, the newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily reported, the AP reported.
Zhaoyuan police said on a microblog that the six belonged to a group which calls themselves the "All-powerful spirit" and had been collecting phone numbers in an effort to recruit new members, according to the AP.
State broadcaster CCTV said religious material had been found at a location linked to the sect but gave no further details, the AP reported.
The group promoted a philosophy based on a distorted reading of the Christian Bible and had been banned as an "evil cult" by the government in 1995, although that could not be immediately confirmed, according to the AP. Another paper, the Beijing Morning News, said 17 members of the group had been arrested in Beijing in December 2012 for harassing people in a public park with claims that the world was coming to an end.
