Street cleaner, 70, killed as Hong Kong clashes escalate
A STREET cleaner died when he was hit on the head by a brick during protests in Hong Kong.
The 70-year-old, having a lunch break, was “only taking pictures” of clashes between pro-democracy activists and government supporters when he was struck, police said.
Thursday’s death is the second in the escalating violence.
Student Alex Chow, 22, died falling from a building during a police operation a week ago.
Meanwhile, police are probing an alleged assault on Hong Kong Justice Secretary Teresa Cheng after protesters in London shouted “murderer” at her.
Ms Cheng took a tumble after being jostled. She appeared to walk away from the scene but the Chinese embassy said she was injured after being pushed to the ground on Thursday.
The minister is said to have backed legislation – now on hold – that sparked the unrest in
Hong Kong back in June.The Bill would have allowed people to be extradited to China.
No one has been arrested in connection with the alleged assault on Ms Cheng.
The Metropolitan Police, said: “A woman was taken to hospital... suffering an injury to her arm. Enquiries are ongoing to establish the circumstances.”
China had pledged Hong Kong would be one country with two systems for 50 years after the 1997 handover from Britain.
IT IS an intriguing untold wartime story of bitterly divided loyalties, blackmail and terrifying consequences. In 1911, a young Scottish modern languages student travels to Germany, falls in love with a local man and marries him. They make their life together in Hamburg and raise a son.
But in 1938, her husband dies of a sudden heart attack, and the next year she returns to the UK, a middleaged widow, to visit her elderly parents. It is the eve of the Second World War and the Gestapo, having discovered her dual-nationality, force her to spy for them by threatening her son, now a member of the Hitler Youth.
Yet as soon as she returns to the UK, she goes straight to the police and is recruited as a double-agent for the British intelligence services.
It might sound like a movie script, but it’s all true. And author Miller Caldwell, whose great-aunt Hilda Campbell is the woman at the centre of the tale, has turned her sensational story into a novel,A Reluctant Spy.
She saved countless lives, he believes, by misleading the Gestapo with false information, and even had to fake her own death to escape being unmasked.
WITH all the major players in the story long dead, Miller, 69, had a tough task piecing together the details of his greataunt’s wartime role.
The National Archives has no known record of Hilda or her exploits, which are unverifiable.What is beyond doubt is that Hilda Campbell, a young Scottish woman who’d just finished studying modern languages at Aberdeen University, travelled to Germany in 1911 to improve her spoken German. A keen oboist, she went to a classical music concert in Hamburg where she was swept off her feet by a local
PROUD: Miller Caldwell tells his aunt’s story doctor, Willy Büttner Richter. Marriage followed and the newlyweds honeymooned with Hilda’s parents at their home in Forres, near Elgin.
Then the pair set up home in Hamburg and Hilda settled happily into married life.
During the First World War, as an enemy alien, she was placed under house arrest and her movements restricted. Throughout those difficult years she supported her husband and they went on to have a son, Otto.
When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s Otto was compelled to join the Hitler Youth and, like millions, was brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine.
Hilda’s world collapsed on March 12, 1938, when her husband died suddenly from a heart attack.
As war drew near, the widowed single mother found herself torn