Washington, Nov 7 (IANS): More governments in Europe and America have launched their own investigations into alleged Chinese secret police stations identified by a human rights group, with Germany and Chile looking into the reports and France "monitoring" the issue, according to a media report.

Madrid-based non-governmental organisation, Safeguard Defenders, reported in September that China is carrying out "illegal, transnational policing operations" across five continents via 54 so-called police service stations in 30 countries, RFA reported.

Beijing said the stations were set up to provide essential services to Chinese citizens overseas. But Safeguard Defenders said they are actually used to coerce emigrants into returning home to face criminal charges and to silence dissent abroad, the report said.

So far, the Dutch and Irish governments have ordered China to shut down its overseas police service stations in their countries.

Some other European governments, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, are probing the allegations levelled by Safeguard Defenders.

"The German government does not tolerate the exercise of foreign state power, and accordingly, Chinese agencies do not have any executive authority on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany," the German Interior Ministry said, RFA reported.

German authorities are currently having to deal with another case of foreign extraterritoriality, after Hanoi's secret agents were accused of abducting a Vietnamese fugitive in Berlin "in broad daylight" and forcing him to return to Hanoi to face criminal charges.

Vietnam and China are among a handful of countries ruled by Communist parties and their public security apparatuses operate similarly, although on a different scale.

In the United States, where an investigation into the reported overseas police service station in New York is ongoing, the government is taking a broader approach and looking at China's alleged transnational repression and policing efforts in the whole of the country, rather than looking into a single case, RFA reported.