By Audra Ang

A.P. writer

BEIJING—An activist Chinese lawyer with close ties to a prominent jailed dissident is missing, a human rights group said March 7.

Teng Biao did not return home from his Beijing office March 6, despite telling his wife he would be back around 8:30 p.m., the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said on its website.

Teng’s wife, Wang Ling, said she heard someone yelling downstairs around the time her husband was supposed to come home, according to the group. People in the street below said they had seen a man being dragged into a black car, which then drove away, it said.

It was not immediately clear if the man taken away was Teng or why he would go missing. But it is common for activists to be taken away without warning by state security agents who drive unmarked cars.

Teng’s cell phone was turned off March 7 and police at the station that oversees his district said they had not heard about his disappearance. The Beijing public security bureau refused to answer questions over the telephone and did not immediately respond to a faxed request asking for details.

Teng, 34, is a close friend of Hu Jia, a vocal civil rights activist who has been charged with the vague crime of inciting subversion of state power. Hu was taken from his home by agents on Dec. 27 after being confined there for more than 200 days.

China’s communist government is prickly about Hu’s case because it has drawn international attention ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Leaders have invested massive national prestige in the Games and are extremely sensitive to any criticism of the country’s human rights record that might tarnish the honor of hosting them.

At least one website mentioning Hu’s past dealings with authorities was temporarily shut down in recent days.

Hu, 34, started out as an activist on environmental issues and for people with AIDS. He later became a one-man clearinghouse for human rights issues, often chronicling the plight of other dissidents. Hu and his wife clashed repeatedly with police and state security agents, who put him under constant surveillance and confined the couple to their home.

Hu had participated via webcam in a Nov. 26 European Parliament hearing, when he reportedly said it was “ironic that one of the people in charge of organizing the Olympic Games is the head of the Bureau of Public Security, which is responsible for so many human rights violations.”

Teng, a part-time lawyer and a lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law, has been outspoken in his admiration and support for Hu, whom he met about two years ago while working on human rights cases.

“Hu Jia is the bravest among the activists I know because he never avoids any human rights issue,” Teng said in an interview with The Associated Press in January.

Teng and Hu wrote an open letter in September asking the international community to look beyond Beijing’s preparations to host the Aug. 8-24 Olympics and question whether China had fulfilled its promises to improve its human rights record.

“When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg,” the pair wrote. “You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.”

In recent days, Teng was increasingly apprehensive about his safety after police confiscated his passport and threatened to detain him, said an acquaintance of the lawyer who asked not to be further identified.

Also Friday, Wan Yanhai, an AIDS activist who heads the Beijing-based Aizhixing Institute, said the group’s website was shut down for more than an hour March 5 because it contained an old statement that expressed concern for Hu when security agents held him for 41 days at an unknown location in 2006. Hu is the group’s former executive director.

Wan said the company that runs the server, Wan Wang, sent a warning telling Aizhixing to “delete the illegal information” from the site as directed by the Beijing public security bureau or it would shut it down.

“I don’t think the statement about Hu Jia is illegal and I think the notice from Wan Wang was very rude. It’s not acceptable,” Wan said in a telephone interview.

Wan said the public security bureau had in the past asked him to delete references to Chen Guangcheng, a high-profile blind activist, and about an AIDS problem in the hard-hit province of Henan—requests that he had complied with.

An officer at the network security department of the public security bureau, which oversees Internet content, said he had not heard about the Aizhixing website shutdown.