[ad_1]
HONG KONG – Hong Kong police on Monday (September 7) launched criticism of the harsh arrest of a 12-year-old girl, who said she was caught in a crowd of protesters while shopping for art supplies.
Viral video footage showed riot police cornering a group of people in Mong Kok, including the girl, who tried to flee but was roughly pushed to the ground and detained by officers.
She was among 300 people arrested on Sunday (September 6) amid the city’s largest street protest since July 1, as hundreds demonstrated against the postponement of legislative elections and a new national security law.
The girl, who was bruised in the ordeal, said that she had gone out with her older brother to buy art supplies for the school, but they were forced to return as the area had been cordoned off by police.
“When the police suddenly approached, I was very scared,” the girl told local station i-Cable News. “They told us to stay there, but I panicked so I ran.”
The police confirmed the incident, but in a statement posted on Facebook defended their officers saying that the girl had acted “suspiciously” and that “the minimum necessary force” had been applied.
The girl’s mother told Apple Daily she would file a formal complaint on the matter, adding that her two children were fined under anti-gathering virus-related laws.
Pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo said the incident “showed how unnecessarily nervous the Hong Kong police had become,” The Guardian reported.
Sunday’s protests marked the day the legislative elections would have been held, had Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam not postponed them for a year due to the danger of fueling the Covid-19 outbreak in the city. She has been accused of using the pandemic to suppress the opposition.
In Sunday’s demonstrations, protesters also called for the release of 12 Hong Kongers arrested by the Chinese coast guard while trying to flee to Taiwan in a speedboat.
The group had been intercepted some 70 kilometers southeast of Hong Kong on August 23. They were handed over to the police in neighboring Shenzhen and have since disappeared into China’s opaque judicial system.
Attorneys representing some of them on Monday said they had been denied access to their clients.
“They said that I cannot prove that the instructions I received came from family members, even though I provided my client’s birth certificate issued in Hong Kong,” said Ren Quanniu, a lawyer who traveled 1,500 kilometers from downtown China to Shenzhen.
Ren said he also visited the police officer in charge of the case, who declined to receive legal documents, including a written request for his client Wong Wai-yin to be returned to the jurisdiction of Hong Kong.
Mr. Lu Siwei, another lawyer, said that he had a similar experience when he tried to visit his detained client last week.
Both lawyers said the Shenzhen police were treating the case as an “illegal border crossing”, a crime that carries up to a year in jail.
But Mr. Lu said that the police had informed him that some of the detainees could also face the most serious charges of “organizing others to cross the border illegally”, which carry sentences of up to life imprisonment.
The prospect of Hong Kong residents becoming entangled in China’s judicial system was the spark that ignited seven months of massive and often violent pro-democracy protests last year.
• Additional reports from AFP
[ad_2]
