Two 13-year-olds arrested during Hong Kong protest
HONG KONG — Hong Kong police arrested two 13-year-olds on the fringes of anti-government demonstrations over the weekend, including a girl accused of burning a Chinese national flag, authorities said Sunday.
The arrests Saturday appear to be further signals that police are taking an increasingly hard line against the pro-democracy demonstrators who have roiled the city for 3½ months.
Protesters have taken to destroying symbols of Chinese state authority, including flags, in recent months, but the latest arrest comes less than two weeks before Oct. 1, the foremost political holiday on the Chinese calendar and one Beijing takes pains to ensure is celebrated without incident.
The arrests came amid another weekend of protests across the city, and vandalism at several subway stations and shopping malls. Protesters at a mall in northern Hong Kong stomped on and painted a Chinese flag, and heckled businesses that they perceived to be friendly to Beijing.
On Sunday, police said they had also arrested a 13-year-old boy Saturday in the Tseung Kwan O neighborhood of eastern Hong Kong. The boy was arrested on suspicion of unlawful assembly and of possessing “instruments fit for unlawful purposes.”
In a statement, police said the boy had been carrying spray paint and “laser guns,” authorities’ term for laser pens that many protesters have used this summer to annoy officers.
Saturday was another long day of street clashes in which protesters threw bricks and firebombs and police fired multiple rounds of tear gas in Yuen Long, a satellite town near Hong Kong’s border with the Chinese mainland.
Police said protesters had at one point used “hard objects” to attack an officer who was conducting an arrest and attempted to steal his revolver. Television footage from Yuen Long also showed protesters assaulting at least two unarmed men.
On Sunday, local television news stations broadcast protesters stomping on a Chinese flag and spraying it with black paint before dumping it in a river during a pro-democracy rally at a shopping mall in the Sha Tin neighborhood in northern Hong Kong.
A local ordinance says people convicted of desecrating the Chinese flag in Hong Kong by “publicly and willfully burning, mutilating, scrawling on, defiling or trampling on it” face a fine of nearly $6,400 and imprisonment for up to three years.