China Accused As Men Linked To Xi Book Vanish

Hong Kong police are investigating the disappearance of Lee and of three co-workers who are believed to have gone missing in Shenzhen.

“We are deeply concerned by reports about the disappearance and detention of individuals associated with the Causeway Bay Books bookstore in Hong Kong”, said the spokesperson, according to a statement from the British embassy in Beijing.

“This has been one of the black holes in the Hong Kong-mainland legal relationship”, Young said by telephone.

Although Chinese security forces routinely detain dissidents in the mainland without telling their families or charging them, they don’t have any legal right to run in Hong Kong.

“Hong Kong people are very shocked and appalled”, Mr Ho said.

Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has urged Lee Bo, the missing Hong Kong bookseller, to come forward, after an alleged letter from Lee emerged on Monday.

Leung told reporters that the government is “concerned” about the case, and will be following up on it.

Lee Bo, who works for the Causeway Bay bookshop which is owned by the publisher Mighty Current, was last seen on Wednesday in the company’s Chai Wan warehouse after he went to deliver books to a customer.

Hong Kong’s police department classified the disappearance of a bookstore’s co-owner as a missing person case.

“It probably has to do with… a book containing a story about a girlfriend [of Xi’s]… from some years ago”, Ho told a news conference in Hong Kong on Sunday.

“There were warnings given to the owners not to publish this book”.

The case prompted small groups of protesters to march in Hong Kong on Sunday.

“The mainland is targeting our publishing industry and our journalists in a policy that could be described as white terror”, Ho said.

Hong Kong Police have asked the Chinese authorities about the bookseller.

Besides Lee’s call to his wife Saturday, Gui has contacted his wife, who lives in Germany, through Skype several times, the last time on December 24, Bei said.

They didn’t say whether Lee had been located.

Nearly twenty years on, we can safely conclude that the Iron Lady, for once, seemed far too optimistic.

Choi told media sources that she received a phone call from Lee the night he disappeared. Authorities from Britain and Sweden are investigating the disappearance of the bookseller’s colleagues, and more than a million people have viewed a video by a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong begging for global help has been viewed almost 900,000 times on Facebook.

In a handwritten note dated January 3 and purportedly written and signed by Lee, photos of which were widely circulated on social and local media but couldn’t be verified by Reuters, Lee wrote that he had travelled back to China in order to assist with an unspecified “investigation”.

Mr Leung noted widespread rumours that mainland officers are behind the sudden vanishing of Mr Lee Bo, a shareholder in publisher Mighty Current which puts out salacious and politically sensitive tomes about China’s leaders.

“Does it have anything to do with what they’re selling?”

“I am now very good and everything is normal”, the author wrote, without explaining how he reached mainland China without his travel documents or attracting the attention of immigration officials.