Violence hits new levels in Kong Kong

Protest leader targeted in hammer attack

Assailants with hammers attacked a protest organiser hours after lawmakers shouting abuse forced Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to abandon a speech in the legislature. Yesterday’s two dramas highlighted the chaos gripping the semiautonomous Chinese territory after more than four months of antigovernment unrest.

The attack late on Wednesday night on Jimmy Sham, one of the public faces of the protest movement, was reported by his Civil Human Rights Front, which has organised large demonstrations. Sham was on his way to an evening meeting in Kowloon when the four or five attackers pounced, leaving him with bloody head injuries but conscious, the Front said on its Facebook page.

It suggested the assault was politically motivated, linked “to a spreading political terror to threaten and inhibit the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights”.

Earlier in the day, pro-democracy lawmakers yelling that she was “the mother of the mafia police” forced Lam to stop delivering her annual policy address, causing her to walk out of the Legislative Council.

The hostile reception marked another slap in the face for chief executive grappling with the demonstrations and accompanying violence that have undermined her leadership, wrecked trust in the police and opened festering bitterness between opponents and supporters of the protest movement.

After two thwarted attempts, Lam fell back on Plan B: delivering the speech 75 minutes late by video link.

At a news conference afterwards, Lam made clear that she wouldn’t resign and insisted there has been no erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms.

Protests that started in June over a contested extradition bill have grown into anti-police and anti-China anger. The widespread use of tear gas by riot-control squads and 2600 arrests have triggered public disgust with the 30,000-strong police force. Hardcore black-clad and masked protesters have responded with widespread vandalism of China-linked businesses, subway stations and other targets, and attacked police.

This month, two police shootings that injured teenage protesters, the stabbing of a police officer, and the detonation of a small, remotecontrolled bomb close to police officers ratcheted up violence to levels unprecedented since the former British colony reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.