Police in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong have busted a group it said organized mass protests in an attempt to sway court cases and influence sentences, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
The group paid a "relatively regular" group of people to stage protests ostensibly about protecting the rights of petitioners and lawyers working on their behalf, Xinhua said late Sunday.
It named two of the people police detained as Zhai Yanmin, 54, who paid people to stage the protests, and lawyer Liu Jianjun, who hoped to influence judges trying his cases with the protests, the report said.