Police in southern China arrested the suspected mastermind and six accomplices behind a plot to shoot Hong Kong’s leading pro-democracy campaigner Martin Lee (李柱銘), a report said yesterday.
The Sunday Morning Post, citing unnamed Chinese police sources, said officers in Shenzhen had arrested a Hong Kong man allegedly behind the plot and six accomplices with links to Hong Kong organized crime gangs known as triads.
It said the case was due to go before a court in Shenzhen on Thursday.
A Hong Kong court earlier this month sentenced a mainland Chinese gunman to 16 years in jail for possessing firearms with the intention to harm Lee.
A second man was handed a three-year jail term for possessing firearms in connection with the plot which allegedly also targeted media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英).
“If this guy really is the mastermind, this is a big step forward in the investigation,” the Post quoted Lee as saying in response to news of the arrests in Shenzhen.
Lee is a founding member of the city’s Democratic Party and a top barrister. Lai is chairman of Next Media, which runs newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong and Taiwan that are strongly critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Both Lee and Lai were also at the forefront of the campaign to commemorate the 1989 protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that were ended by a bloody military crackdown.
The plot was foiled after an officer stopped the gunman by chance at a police checkpoint in August last year. He was found to have a homemade pistol and five rounds of ammunition in his bag.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
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‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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