[ad_1]
Hong Kong:
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, one of many metropolis’s most vocal Beijing critics, was arrested Monday below a brand new nationwide safety legislation for colluding with international forces, deepening a crackdown on democracy supporters.
“They arrested him at his house at about 7am. Our lawyers are on the way to the police station,” Mark Simon, an in depth aide, instructed AFP, including that different members of Lai’s media group had additionally been arrested.
A police supply talking on situation of anonymity instructed AFP Lai was arrested for colluding with international forces — one of many new nationwide safety offences — and fraud.
Lai owns the Apple Daily newspaper and Next Magazine, two retailers unapologetically pro-democracy and demanding of Beijing.
On Twitter, Simon mentioned officers have been executing search warrants at each Lai’s mansion and his son’s home.
Few Hong Kongers generate the extent of vitriol from Beijing that Lai does.
For many residents of the stressed semi-autonomous metropolis, he’s an unlikely hero — a pugnacious, self-made tabloid proprietor and the one tycoon prepared to criticise Beijing.
But in China’s state media he’s a “traitor”, the most important “black hand” behind final 12 months’s enormous pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the pinnacle of a brand new “Gang of Four” conspiring with international nations to undermine the motherland.
Lai spoke to AFP in mid-June, two weeks earlier than the brand new safety legislation was imposed on town.
“I’m prepared for prison,” the 72-year-old mentioned. “If it comes, I will have the opportunity to read books I haven’t read. The only thing I can do is to be positive.”
He described the legislation as “a death knell for Hong Kong”.
“It will supersede or destroy our rule of law and destroy our international financial status,” he mentioned.
He additionally mentioned he feared authorities would come after his journalists.
The safety legislation targets secession, subversion, terrorism and colluding with international forces.
It was introduced in to quell final 12 months’s usually violent protests.
Both China and Hong Kong have mentioned it won’t have an effect on folks’s freedoms and solely targets a minority.
But its broadly-worded provisions criminalise sure political speech, similar to advocating for sanctions, better autonomy or independence for Hong Kong.
Critics, together with many Western nations, consider the legislation has ended the important thing liberties and autonomy that Beijing promised Hong Kong might hold after its 1997 handover by Britain.
Lai isn’t any stranger to arrest.
He is already being prosecuted for participating in final 12 months’s protests — and for defying a police ban to attend a vigil in early June commemorating Beijing’s lethal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
[ad_2]
Source hyperlink