A veteran Hong Kong journalist was yesterday arrested by national security police for allegedly conspiring to publish “seditious materials,” police said.
The arrest is the latest blow to the media in Hong Kong, which has seen its freedom rating plummet as Beijing cracks down on dissent.
Allan Au (區家麟), a 54-year-old reporter and journalism lecturer, was arrested in a dawn raid by the Hong Kong National Security Police unit, multiple local media outlets reported.
A senior police source confirmed Au’s arrest on a charge of “conspiracy to publish seditious materials.”
Police later confirmed the arrest of a 54-year-old on the same charge in a statement that did not name Au, which is local practice.
“Further arrests may be made,” the statement said.
Au is a former columnist for Stand News, an online news platform that was shuttered in December last year after authorities froze the company’s assets using the National Security Law.
Two other senior employees of Stand News have already been charged with sedition.
National security charges have also been brought against jailed pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai (黎智英) and six former senior executives of the Apple Daily.
Once Hong Kong’s most popular tabloid, the Apple Daily collapsed last year when its newsroom was raided and assets were frozen under the National Security Law.
Soon after Stand News was shut down, Au began to write “good morning” each day on his Facebook page to confirm his safety.
One of the territory’s most experienced local columnists, he was a Knight fellow at Stanford University in 2005 and earned a doctorate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Au in 2017 published a book about censorship in Hong Kong titled Freedom Under 20 Shades of Shadow.
Au spent more than a decade working for RTHK, Hong Kong’s government broadcaster, running a current affairs show, but he was axed last year after the authorities declared a shake-up that began transforming the once editorially independent broadcaster into something more resembling Chinese state media.
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