Canadian police officer says he feared Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou would ‘put up a fight’ during arrest
- Constable Winston Yep said Meng’s arrest was delayed until after she got off her plane at Vancouver’s airport because he did not know ‘what she was capable of’
- But Meng’s lawyer says the delay was orchestrated to let border officers question Meng first, in violation of her rights, and he ridiculed Yep’s claims
The Canadian police officer who arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver’s airport almost two years ago testified on Monday about the operation, saying safety concerns about “what she was capable of” helped sway the decision not to arrest Meng on the plane.
But Meng’s lawyer Richard Peck ridiculed the assertion by Constable Winston Yep of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), asking the officer in cross-examination if it was something that “just popped into your head” on the witness box, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver.
The issue is important to Meng’s case as she tries to defeat extradition to the US on fraud charges, because her lawyers say police deliberately delayed arresting her until after she got off the plane and had been questioned for three hours by border officers.
This was to gather evidence for the US fraud case against her and violated her Canadian Charter rights, say her lawyers, who want the extradition case thrown out as a result.
Yep, the first witness in the long-running case, testified that he had no idea who Meng was until being given a warrant the day before her December 1, 2018, arrest, and that he only became involved in the case because his unit was short staffed at the time.
The arrest of Meng would infuriate Beijing and send China’s relations with the US and Canada into a downward spiral.