Hong Kong police announced the arrests Tuesday of nine people after the alleged discovery of a weapons, explosives, and chemical cache authorities suspect was meant …
Hong Kong police announced the arrests Tuesday of nine people after the alleged discovery of a weapons, explosives, and chemical cache authorities suspect was meant for use in bombing public areas. Six of those arrested are children. “They all have some planning at some stage to leave Hong Kong for good. So the group is particularly interested in this group and recruited them to join the plot to do the sabotage before their departure,” senior police superintendent Steve Li told authorities about the children. The adults involved in the mass arrest are reportedly employees at a local secondary school and a university, according to Radio Television Hong Kong ( RTHK). The ages of those arrested range from 15 to 39. The arrests are the latest in a crackdown on suspected anti-communist dissidents in the city that began with a raid by hundreds of police officers on the offices of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong’s most popular anti-communist newspaper. The raid resulted in the arrest of most of the newspaper’s senior staff and the freezing of the newspaper’s assets; Apple Daily shut down a week later, keeping only its Taiwanese edition active. Many of those arrested in the Apple Daily raid — and the newspaper’s owner, Jimmy Lai — are facing prosecution for violating the Communist Party’s “national security law,” which requires a minimum sentence of ten years in prison for those found guilty of the crimes of terrorism, sedition, incitement to foreign interference, or “subversion of state power.” Police appear to be planning to prosecute those arrested Tuesday, for possessing explosives and allegedly plotting to bomb major roads, under the same law as the journalists, for writing articles condemning Chinese human rights abuses. Under Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” policy, laws the Communist Party in Beijing passes do not apply to the city.
