The city’s roiling unrest took a dark turn late yesterday when gangs of men – most wearing white T-shirts and carrying bats, sticks and metal poles – attacked anti-government demonstrators as they returned from another huge march earlier that day.
Footage from the attack broadcast live on Facebook showed people screaming as the men beat multiple protesters and journalists in Yuen Long station and inside subway trains, leaving pools of blood on the floor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDCBogBTwlg
Hospital authorities said 45 people were wounded in the attack, with one man in critical condition and five others with serious injuries.
Critics rounded on the city’s embattled police force, accusing officers of taking more than an hour to reach the station despite frantic calls from those under attack and then failing to arrest the armed men who stayed in the streets around the station into Monday morning.
Some men in white shirts were later filmed leaving the scene in cars with Chinese mainland number plates.
Some politicians and activists have long linked Hong Kong’s shadowy network of triad criminal gangs to political intimidation and violence in recent years.
On Sunday night, men in white t-shirts, some armed with poles, flooded into the rural Yuen Long station and stormed a train, attacking passengers, according to footage taken by commuters and Democratic Party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting.
Lam, who was injured in the attack, said he was angry about a slow police response after he alerted them to the trouble, government-funded broadcaster RTHK reported.
Lam said it took police more than an hour to arrive after he alerted them and they had failed to protect the public, allowing the triads to run rampant.
“Their very barbaric and violent acts have already completely violated the bottom line of Hong Kong’s civilised society,” he told reporters early today.
“Is Hong Kong now allowing triads to do what they want, beating up people on the street with weapons?”
Nathan Law, a prominent pro-democracy activist, added on Twitter: “When the Chinese mobs are attacking the citizens, no law enforcement is there. Shame on the government.”
The clashes have ratcheted up fears that the city’s feared triad gangs are wading into the political conflict.
Yuen Long lies in the New Territories near the Chinese border where the criminal gangs and staunchly pro-Beijing rural committees remain influential.
Police said early on Monday they had not made any arrests at the station or during a follow-up search of a nearby village but were still investigating.
Yau Nai-keung, Yuen Long assistant district police commander, told reporters that an initial police patrol had to wait for more reinforcements given a situation involving more than 100 people.
Groups of men in white were seen by eye-witnesses with poles and bamboo staves at a nearby village but Yau said police saw no weapons when they arrived.
“We can’t say you have a problem because you are dressed in white and we have to arrest you. We will treat them fairly no matter which camp they are in,” Yau said.
On Sunday police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse activists on the edge of Hong Kong’s financial district after they had fled China’s Liaison Office, its main representative branch in the city.
The Chinese government, including office director Wang Zhimin, condemned the acts, which saw signs and a state symbol daubed with graffiti and eggs thrown against walls and windows.
Wang said that a damaged symbol had been replaced overnight.
Hong Kong has been plunged into its worst crisis in recent history by weeks of marches and sporadic violent confrontations between police and pockets of hard-core protesters.
The initial protests were lit by a now-suspended bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China.
But they have since evolved into a wider movement calling for democratic reforms, universal suffrage and a halt to sliding freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.
The city’s parliament was trashed by protesters earlier this month, as Beijing’s authority faces its most serious challenge since Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997.