Kidnaping of Chinese at Airport Charged : Slave labor: Peasants arriving in N.Y. for an organic farming project are allegedly herded into a waiting car and driven away. The FBI is called in.

Authorities on Thursday were investigating a reported kidnaping of seven Chinese peasants at John F. Kennedy International Airport just after their arrival in this country to study organic farming methods.

The peasants, who allegedly were abducted Wednesday by a group of screaming Asian men who herded them into a waiting car and sped off, were part of a delegation of 16 Chinese nationals invited to the United States for an 11-month visit by the World Energy Foundation near Boston.

Molly Aitken, the foundation’s president, told airport security officers that she went to Kennedy airport to pick up the delegation after their arrival Wednesday evening at the Pan Am terminal on an Air China flight originating in Beijing.

As the Chinese were leaving the terminal on their way to waiting transportation at about 7:30 p.m., Aitken recounted to investigators, they were confronted by three or four men who screamed and yelled at the group and then forced seven members into a compact car with New Jersey license plates.

“It was terrible,” Aitken said later in a published interview. “I never saw anything like it in my life.”

Aitken also was quoted as saying that she had been warned earlier by a U.S. consular official in China to be “very careful” with her charges because Chinese are often abducted and forced to work like “slave labor” in New York’s Chinatown.

But spokesmen for both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Port Authority of New York, which operates the city’s airports, said that they were not aware of any such incident in the city before.

Joseph Valiquette, a spokesman for the FBI’s New York office, also said that, as far as his agency is concerned, it was too soon to call the incident at Kennedy a kidnaping.

“The FBI is conducting a preliminary investigation to determine what, if any, federal laws have been violated,” he said. He declined to elaborate.

In Washington, another federal official, who requested anonymity, said: “We don’t know if this whole thing was orchestrated before they got here. It could have been a bunch of relatives” who used this as a ploy to smuggle them into this country.

A New York police official who also declined to be identified said Aiken’s account sounded strange. “How do three Asian males abduct 7 other Asian males and drive away in a small car?” he asked.

Armando Arrastia, a Port Authority spokesman, said that Aitken told investigators that the alleged abductors carried no visible weapons but that one of them barked at an interpreter in Chinese: “Stay out of this or you’ll be hurt” or “Stay out of this or you’ll be killed.”

The seven men who allegedly were kidnaped range in age from 25 to 35. They were identified as Yang Juang Huang, Guan Zhou Lin, Zhuang Guo Lin, Shi Feng Chen, Xin Qin Lin, Tian Bao Chen and Ben Yong Chen.

The World Energy Foundation, which is based in Athol, Mass., a rural area about 50 miles west of Boston, is dedicated to agricultural and rural development in Third World regions.

Aitken arranged for the 16 Chinese nationals, whom she described as “simple peasants,” to visit Athol for a farming project involving the construction of a model farm and cultivation of vegetables through such advanced techniques as solar greenhouses. She returned to Massachusetts early Thursday with the remaining nine members of the group.

Staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.