Mystery deepens over missing booksellers after Lam Wing-kee makes explosive allegations in Hong Kong
Lam Wing-kee’s explosive revelations raise questions about the power of the Hong Kong government to guarantee the security of its citizens
A chapter in the mystery of the missing Hong Kong booksellers closed uneventfully earlier this week. When Lam Wing-kee finally showed up in the city on Tuesday, all five men from the Causeway Bay bookstore were finally accounted for, eight months after they had disappeared without a trace, one by one over a few weeks.
But on Thursday, Lam changed the storyline dramatically. Confirming Hongkongers’ worst fears, he revealed he was abducted at the border last October, blindfolded, handcuffed and bundled off up north to Ningbo before being kept in solitary confinement for five months.
He was told he had committed a crime for mailing and delivering banned books on the mainland. His captors were not law enforcement agents but a secretive central special investigation unit. He was made to promise on paper he would neither contact his family nor hire a lawyer – all the elements of due process in the administration of justice in Hong Kong that were denied him on the mainland.
“I spent five months in a space that was 200 to less than 300 square feet, 24 hours a day. I was watched over by six teams of two – 24 hours a day.”
He was made to recite lines, he told a shocked city, to appear on a scripted televised interview before he was sent to Shaoguan in northern Guangdong when the surveillance eased.