Media tycoon Lai charged under security law
HONG KONG/SYDNEY: Hong Kong media tycoon and prominent pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai is being charged with foreign collusion under the city’s sweeping national security law, a move likely to prompt further international criticism of China’s political crackdown In the city.
The charges were reported by local media on Friday and appeared to later be confirmed by police in a statement that didn’t specifically mention Lai by name, as per the force’s typical practice.
“After in-depth investigation by National Security Department of Hong Kong Police, a 73-yearold man was charged with an additional offence of ‘collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security,’” the police said.
In addition, a teenager was found guilty on Friday of insulting China’s national flag and unlawful assembly. Tony Chung, a 19-year-old who led a now-disbanded pro-democracy group, was convicted for throwing the Chinese flag to the ground during scuffles outside Hong Kong’s legislature in May 2019.
He was arrested late October and had been remanded in custody since. Speculation has swirled that police moved on Chung because he was hoping to ask for asylum at the US consulate. He will be sentenced on December 29.
Uighur family reunited
An Australian man from China’s Muslim Uighur community was reunited with his family, including a three-year-old son he had never met, after Beijing agreed they could depart Xinjiang.
Sadam Abudusalamu posted on Twitter photographs of his family arriving at Sydney airport on Thursday. In 2017, Chinese authorities banned Abudusalamu’s wife Nadila Wumaier and son from leaving Xinjiang by confiscating their passports, in what became a high-profile human rights case in Australia.
News assistant detained US financial news service Bloomberg said on Friday that Chinese authorities have detained one of its Beijing-based news assistants on what they said was suspicion of endangering national security. Chinese citizen Haze Fan was seen being taken from her apartment building accompanied by security officers in plain clothes on Monday, shortly after her last contact with her editors.