Two police officers disciplined after searching reporter's hotel room

Two police officers in Quanzhou, East China's Fujian province, were punished on Tuesday after they improperly broke into a hotel room to check on a female journalist and the incident was disclosed to the public.

The Quanzhou Public Security Bureau said in a statement on Tuesday that the facts written by Zhou Chen, the affected female reporter who works for Caixin Weekly, were essentially true and confirmed the police officers cited in Quangang district were guilty of misconduct in law enforcement.

The bureau ordered Chen Binyang, deputy director of the district's public security department, to do a deep self-examination, and suspended Chen Huashan, a police officer in the sub-bureau, the statement said.

Zhou, an environmental reporter, wrote how the officers barged into her hotel room on Nov 11, and the article quickly spread on the internet after it was published in the weekly on Monday.

In the article, she said she came to Quanzhou to cover a story after the city suffered serious pollution on Nov 4, but she never thought she would be accused of being a prostitute.

At about 11:30 pm on Nov 11, while she was checking her mobile phone in bed, four police officers, including two auxiliaries, broke in her room. They demanded she show her identity card and also checked her room's windows and bathroom to make sure no one else was there, the article said.

It also noted that police did not show any credentials or identity documents during the incident.

After the police left, Zhou received an apology via a phone call from the hotel's reception desk, in which, she was told, her room was the only target as the police only took her room card, it added.

The bureau said it paid high attention to the incident after Zhou's article was forwarded online, establishing a special team to handle the case on Monday.