Hong Kong police yesterday shot a democracy campaigner as the territory was lashed by its worst unrest of the year, hours after Beijing celebrated 70 years of Chinese Communist Party rule with a massive military parade.
It was the first such shooting in nearly four months of increasingly violent protests and threatened to strip the spotlight from China’s carefully choreographed birthday party, designed to underscore its status as a global superpower.
While Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took salutes from about 15,000 troops in the capital, pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong threw eggs at his portrait, with tens of thousands of people defying police orders to disperse.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Running battles raged for hours across multiple locations, with some hardcore protesters hurling rocks and gasoline bombs, while police responded for the most part with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon.
In Tsuen Wan District, a police officer unloaded his weapon at close range into a young man after his unit was attacked by protesters armed with poles and umbrellas, videos filmed by student reporters showed.
The Hong Kong Police Force confirmed in a video posted on Facebook that an 18-year-old man was shot during the protest and was conscious when sent to Princess Margaret Hospital.
The man was shot near the left shoulder during clashes with officers, Hong Kong Police Force Senior Superintendent Yolanda Yu (余鎧均) said in the video.
The lives of the officer who discharged the weapon and the officer’s colleagues were “under serious threat” during the incident, Yu said.
As of 6pm, 31 people aged 18 to 75 had been hospitalized for injuries, with two in critical and one in serious condition, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong‘s Information Services Department said by telephone, citing information from the Hospital Authority.
Hong Kong is seething with anger over Beijing’s rule and many of the fights on Sunday were especially fierce, even by the standards of this summer’s violence, which has raged for 17 consecutive weeks.
In one clash several police and reporters were wounded by corrosive liquid thrown by protesters. In another, riot police were forced to flee into a town hall to escape a barrage of projectiles.
Burning barricades sent a pall of black smoke over the territory, a regional hub for some of the world’s biggest banks.
The violence cast a shadow over the lavish parade in Beijing where tanks, new nuclear missiles and a supersonic drone were paraded as Xi and other top officials — including Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam ((林鄭月娥) — watched from a rostrum overlooking Tiananmen Square.
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