Fresh protests, heat hit city
PROTESTERS in Hong Kong blocked roads and forced workers to leave the justice secretary’s offices yesterday in the latest unrest to rock the city over an extradition bill that has now been suspended.
Millions have thronged the streets in the past three weeks to demand that the bill – which would allow criminal suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial in courts controlled by the Chinese Communist Party – be scrapped altogether.
In sweltering heat of 32°C some protesters shouted: “Condemn excessive force by police and release protesters.” Minor scuffles broke out between pro-democracy group Demosisto and officers.
Police chief Stephen Lo warned of consequences of outbreaks of violence and condemned what he said was an environment of hostility making his officers’ task difficult. In the early hours, riot police wielding batons and shields chased dozens of protesters as they broke up a siege of police headquarters. By nightfall, only 200 protesters remained. They sat peacefully outside government headquarters.
The demonstrators have seized on this week’s G20 summit of world leaders in Japan to appeal for Hong Kong’s plight to be put on the agenda, a move certain to rile Beijing, which has vowed not to tolerate such discussion.
“We know that the G20 is coming. We want to grasp this opportunity to voice for ourselves,” said Jack Cool Tsang, 30, a theatre technician.
Images of police firing rubber bullets and tear gas beneath gleaming skyscrapers this month near the heart of the financial centre grabbed global headlines and drew condemnation from international rights groups and protest organisers.
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, who has kept a low profile, bowed to public pressure and suspended the bill a day after the violent protests, but stopped short of cancelling the measure outright and rejected repeated calls to step down. Opponents of the extradition bill fear being placed at the mercy of a justice system rights group say is plagued by torture, forced confessions and arbitrary detentions.
The demonstrations have forced the temporary closure of government offices, blocked major roads and caused massive disruptions.
Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, it has been governed under a “one country, two systems” formula that allows freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China.
Yesterday, a Hong Kong government statement said Lam had met senior police officers and gave them her full support to maintain law and order. Lam also met representatives in the education and religious sectors, senior civil servants and foreign consuls to exchange views on the “current social situation”, it said. THE children of high-profile Egyptian Islamists detained in the same prison as former president Mohamed Morsi before his sudden death last week, say they fear for their parents’ health.
Morsi, 67, died after collapsing during a court appearance at Cairo’s Tora prison complex, where he was moved after army chief-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew him in 2013 and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters.
Other senior Brotherhood members are jailed in Tora’s maximumsecurity “Scorpion” wing, often in solitary confinement. The families of four detainees, all at Tora, said their relatives were being held under extremely poor conditions, and deprived of adequate health care.
Officials have denied mistreating prisoners or neglecting their health.
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a 68-year-old Islamist former presidential candidate who ran for election against Mursi in 2012, is being held at Tora’s Al-Mazra wing.
Arrested in February 2018, he is being held in pre-trial detention over alleged connections with the nowbanned Brotherhood. He denies the charges, according to his son Ahmed.
Aboul Fotouh has diabetes, hypertension, heart and respiratory problems which require him to sleep with an oxygen machine that he brought with him, but it does not work properly in the high temperatures of the prison cell, Ahmed said.
Former Morsi aide Essam al-Haddad has been in solitary confinement since his arrest six years ago, and was moved to a solitary cell in the Tora hospital complex after having several heart attacks, his son Abdullah said.
Another of Haddad’s sons, Gihad, a Brotherhood spokesperson, is held in Scorpion where he suffered physical abuse after writing an opinion piece defending the movement for the New York Times in 2017, Abdullah said.
According to a Human Rights Watch estimate published in 2017, at least 60 000 people have been detained on political grounds since 2013.
Morsi, who was on trial for espionage and had been sentenced to more than 40 years on other charges, was held in Tora’s al-Molhaq prison and had been in solitary confinement since his arrest in 2013, his family said.
He had previously fainted during hearings, suffered diabetic comas, had a condition in his left eye, and back and neck pains from sleeping on the bare floor of his cell, according to statements citing Morsi’s court testimony and rights groups.