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AFP
Hong Kong
Dozens of pro-democracy protesters stood firm within a besieged Hong Kong campus on Wednesday, where an “SOS” sign was laid out as police said they had made 700 arrests since the university became the epicentre of the most intense confrontation in the city’s near-six month crisis.
The four-day standoff between demonstrators and police at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has also rippled overseas, with the UN’s human rights office urging a peaceful resolution, while the US senate passed new legislation supporting protesters’ demands.
The focus of nearly six months of increasingly savage anti-China protests has shifted to the PolyU campus, a stone’s throw from the city’s harbour, where hardcore protesters have held off riot police with Molotov cocktails, bricks and arrows.
Seven hundred people have been arrested across “the whole PolyU incident,” chief superintendent Ricky Ho told reporetrs late Wednesday giving updated figures.
Around 300 protesters aged under-18 in the campus also had their details taken before being “let go”, he said.
Among the arrested were two protesters who were held on Wednesday as they tried to emerge from a sewer around half a kilometre outside the campus - a sign of the desperate measures being taken to break the police cordon.
The protest movement began over a now-shelved bill to allow extraditions to China, which revived fears that Beijing was slicing into the city’s freedoms.
Millions of angry citizens have hit the streets in a movement that snowballed into wider calls for free elections and an inquiry into alleged police brutality, demands that Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leaders have rebuffed. The city’s reputation for prosperity and stability has been smashed by the unrest, tipping the economy into recession and forcing a slew of major sporting and entertainment events to be pulled.
Hong Kong
Dozens of pro-democracy protesters stood firm within a besieged Hong Kong campus on Wednesday, where an “SOS” sign was laid out as police said they had made 700 arrests since the university became the epicentre of the most intense confrontation in the city’s near-six month crisis.
The four-day standoff between demonstrators and police at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has also rippled overseas, with the UN’s human rights office urging a peaceful resolution, while the US senate passed new legislation supporting protesters’ demands.
The focus of nearly six months of increasingly savage anti-China protests has shifted to the PolyU campus, a stone’s throw from the city’s harbour, where hardcore protesters have held off riot police with Molotov cocktails, bricks and arrows.
Seven hundred people have been arrested across “the whole PolyU incident,” chief superintendent Ricky Ho told reporetrs late Wednesday giving updated figures.
Around 300 protesters aged under-18 in the campus also had their details taken before being “let go”, he said.
Among the arrested were two protesters who were held on Wednesday as they tried to emerge from a sewer around half a kilometre outside the campus - a sign of the desperate measures being taken to break the police cordon.
The protest movement began over a now-shelved bill to allow extraditions to China, which revived fears that Beijing was slicing into the city’s freedoms.
Millions of angry citizens have hit the streets in a movement that snowballed into wider calls for free elections and an inquiry into alleged police brutality, demands that Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leaders have rebuffed. The city’s reputation for prosperity and stability has been smashed by the unrest, tipping the economy into recession and forcing a slew of major sporting and entertainment events to be pulled.
