HK cops, students clash all day
University campus, business district emerge as new battlegrounds as unrest continues
Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters fought intense battles with riot police on a university campus and paralysed the city’s upmarket business district on Tuesday, extending one of the most violent stretches of unrest seen in more than five months of political chaos.
The confrontations followed a particularly brutal day on Monday, when police shot a protester and a man was set on fire, prompting calls from western powers for compromise but further fury in China against any challenge to its rule. The city’s universities emerged as a new flashpoint throughout on Tuesday with sustained clashes at major campuses for the first time.
The epicentre was the Chinese
University of Hong Kong where the usually placid hillside grounds were turned into a battlefield.
Police fired repeated volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets at hundreds of protesters who had built barricades ending an hourslong stand-off between the two sides. Protesters responded with bricks and petrol bombs, while a vehicle used in a barricade was set alight.
After a brief hiatus in which faculty staff tried to mediate, new clashes broke in the evening with flames lighting up the night sky and fresh rounds of tear gas whizzing through the air.
Police used a water cannon truck in an attempt to dislodge protesters but they remained behind their makeshift shield walls. There were smaller clashes on three other university campuses throughout the day.