A leading Chinese dissident, who has won an international award for his work in publicising China's human rights issues on the Internet, has gone missing, a rights group said Thursday.

Huang Qi was last seen on Tuesday evening being taken away by three unidentified people and forced into a car in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan province, the Tianwang Human Rights Centre said.

A lawyer with the rights centre and a professor with a local university who were with Huang have also gone missing, according to an emailed statement from the centre, which he co-founded.

"I've been trying to reach Huang Qi by phone, but he is not answering," said a Chengdu lawyer surnamed Xu, who is a friend of the three missing people.

"Normally you can reach him by phone."

The phones of the other two missing people also rang, but were not answered, she said.

The centre said it feared that Huang may have been taken into police custody and has called on the government to investigate the disappearance of the three men and release them.

Huang was jailed for subversion from 2000 to 2005 after he set up a website that independently investigated government corruption and advocated democracy.

The website called for the release of those jailed for the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests that were crushed by the Chinese military.

It was also set up to track missing people in China, especially women and children who had been abducted and trafficked.

Huang was awarded the 2004 Cyberfreedom Prize by the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Since being released from prison, Huang resumed his human rights work and opened the Tianwang centre, which claims to be the only non-government human rights organisation in China.

Police in Chengdu said it had no knowledge of Huang's disappearance when contacted by AFP.