Hong Kong campus evac
Cops retreat after 12-day siege
Hong Kong police on Friday vacated a university campus after a 12day blockade in which they sought to arrest pro-democracy activists holed up inside.
Dozens of officers had entered the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University Thursday to collect evidence and remove dangerous items — including 3,989 gasoline bombs, 1,339 explosive items, 601 bottles of corrosive liquids and 573 weapons, police said.
No protesters were found, although a masked man had told local media on Wednesday that about 20 people were still in hiding there to avoid arrest.
They were apparent holdouts from the roughly 1,100 demonstrators who had retreated inside after battles with riot police.
At one point Friday, a man and woman emerged from the campus wearing black face masks and walked out hand-in-hand, with no sign of police.
More than 1,300 people were arrested during the turmoil at the university, senior police official Kwok Ka-chuen told reporters Friday. A total of 5,890 people have been arrested amid protests in the city since early June, he said.
The university estimated it would take five to six months to repair damage to the battered campus.
“Many classrooms, laboratories and the library were destroyed. Even so, there’s been no loss of life. We insisted on adopting a humane way to solve the crisis,” university President Teng Jin-Guang told reporters, saying the next semester would go ahead on time.
The university standoff was one of the most dramatic episodes in almost six months of unrest that began with a massive march against an extradition bill seen as an erosion of freedoms promised when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
The campus and the streets surrounding the school were the center of intense clashes between protesters and police. On Nov. 18, street demonstrators attempted to break a police perimeter of the school in the hopes of freeing student activists who were trapped on the campus.
Police responded by firing more than 1,000 rounds of tear gas at the protesters.
Protesters carried umbrellas to protect themselves from police water cannons during the attempted breakthrough.
Other universities were also occupied by protesters during the weekslong demonstrations, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Protesters occupied that campus for about five days in November.