Hong Kong Bookseller Detained By Chinese Authorities For Months Finally Speaks Out

The pro-Beijing Sing Tao Newspaper Group conducted “exclusive” interviews with the booksellers when they were detained on the mainland and after their return to Hong Kong.

Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee, right, is accompanied by pro-democracy lawyer Albert Ho after giving a news conference in Hong Kong Thursday, June 16, 2016.

“The Causeway Bay Books event touched the bottom line of Hong Kong people”, he said. They disappeared previous year and later ended up in mainland police custody.

The protesters, carrying banners that read: “Fight until the very end”, marched from Causeway Bay Books, the business at the center of the controversy, to China’s liaison office in the territory. Mr Lee had told him he was kidnapped in Hong Kong itself, said Mr Lam.

Four of the five detainees, including Lam, were paraded on Phoenix Television allegedly confessing to crimes, including “illegal book selling.”

L am Wing-kee, one of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing a year ago, broke his silence late on Thursday to reveal that he and his colleagues had been kidnapped by Chinese security agents and forced to subsequently confess to crimes on Chinese state television. Even his toothbrush and nail clipper were tethered to a minder for fear Lam would use them to harm himself, he said.

Ann Chiang, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council representing the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), tried to assuage people’s fears in a statement saying that there is no need for Hong Kongers to be anxious.

“On Oct. 24 previous year, I was detained as I was crossing the border into Shenzhen”, Lam said. The story did not mention that Lam said he had been blindfolded and handcuffed during his detention, that he had been denied access to lawyers or the outside world, or that, buy his account, security personnel were so anxious that he might commit suicide that they tied a string to his toothbrush and held onto it, in case he tried to shove it down his throat and choke himself to death.

Hong Kong activists have expressed their support of Lam. Joshua Wong of the Umbrella Movement and leader of civic organization Demosisto, led a rally at the Western Police Station.

In addition to highlighting that Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted down the proposal to introduce universal suffrage for the election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive from 2017, the report said the booksellers case raised “grave concerns over human rights” and is the “most serious challenge to Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the “one country, two systems” principle since Hong Kong’s handover to the PRC in 1997″. “Lam Wing-kee never told me it was contrary to mainland laws to sell these books through mailing”. And he said his former colleague Lee Po had previously provided the Chinese authorities with documents relating to the company’s list of customers, but not the original computer drive.

During the last three months of his detention, Lam said, he was placed in a room customized for suicide watch.

But on Thursday, the bookseller told reporters it had been scripted, edited and supervised by a director, according to local media outlet RTHK.

“They wanted to know who was buying the books and stuff like that”, Lam said, adding that he heard that his case was being handled directly by a special task force set up by the central government in Beijing. The question is, as the head of Hong Kong, will he [continue to] defend Hong Kong’s autonomy…

One of the booksellers, Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, is believed to be still detained on the mainland.

On Thursday, Lam Wing Kee, one of the five who disappeared in 2015 and turned up in China, said at a news conference that the confession they made in February was scripted, BBC reported.

He also lambasted Chinese authorities for the detainment, claiming that fellow bookseller Lee Bo had also been forcibly taken from Hong Kong, rather than voluntarily going to the mainland as Bo has repeatedly claimed, both during his detainment and upon arriving back in Hong Kong briefly in late March.