Hong Kong protesters decry Beijing’s detention of bookseller

Mr Lam and three of his colleagues – Swedish national Gui Minhai, Lui Por and Cheung Chi-ping confessed to “illegal book trading” on China’s Phoenix Television in February, which he said was scripted.

Mr Lam, who owned the Causeway Bay Bookstore before it was purchased by Mr Gui, says he was abducted in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on 24 October on a routine trip to see his girlfriend. It was at around 7am in the morning – very early – when people from the police station and the people who took me away came over with breakfast. The abductors gave him food, but refused to answer his question as to why he was detained. He was later transferred to Shaoguan, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. “It took about 13 or 14 hours”.

He said that although he was not physically harmed, he had suffered mentally in detention and was unable to contact a lawyer or his family.

Mr. Lam’s ordeal began on October 24, during what he said was a routine trip to see his girlfriend on the mainland.

Ho said on Wednesday that she, with the support of eight small, independent businesses, will hold a free-of-charge concert on Sunday – in the same Hong Kong neighborhood and at around the same time as the one originally arranged by Lancome.

When Lam was released on Tuesday, he was expected to have stuck to the same story.

Pro-democracy legislators are demanding to know what Hong Kong authorities have done to help the booksellers, accusing them of being a puppet of China.

The human rights group Amnesty International called on the Chinese authorities to “admit what really happened to the five Hong Kong booksellers”.

A packed room of Hong Kong and foreign media heard he had only been released on the understanding he would return to the mainland with a database of book shop customers for authorities. This is about the freedom of Hong Kong people.

Lee, who went missing from his workplace in Hong Kong on December 30, returned to mainland China after spending less than 24 hours in Hong Kong. “The Hong Kong public will no longer believe what (the government) says in the future and it may result in a public trust crisis”.

“He is very courageous”, she said.

“If I myself, being the least vulnerable among the five booksellers, remained silent, Hong Kong would become hopeless”. But he could not explain how he had left Hong Kong without clearing immigration checks – leading to continuing suspicions that he had been abducted by Chinese agents, and pressurized to keep quiet about it.

“Hong Kong’s conscience!” wrote news site editor Zhang Jieping on Facebook.

“I was then interrogated by some other people”, he said.

One of the five booksellers who went missing past year has confirmed that his colleague Lee Bo was abducted in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong government said in a statement that the police were reaching out to Lam and would take appropriate action.

Several dozen members of a pro-democracy party founded by the student leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution protests gathered outside a Chinese government office in Hong Kong Friday, news agencies reported.

Mr Lam expressed fear for the wellbeing of his colleagues and friends but also had a defiant message.

CDT is itself blocked in China because it regularly reports on leaked censorship instructions and other information deemed sensitive by the Chinese government. The Chinese government has forced Hong Kong people into a dead end.

“You can see from the fact that Mr. Lam went to a councillor for help and not the police – that our law enforcement system has already lost its ability to safeguard our citizens”, she told HKFP.

The Causeway Bay Bookstore closed after the five disappeared, with all its books sent to a paper mill, including “2017 China Changes”, by Liu Lu, a USA -based Chinese writer-in-exile.

Corporations doing business in Hong Kong are said to be “looking at this very closely and are hugely concerned”, according to an unnamed Hong Kong-based executive working on Wall Street.