No redemption in sewers as desperate radicals search high and low for way to escape, with Hong Kong police closing in around them
- Small number of protesters remain inside Polytechnic University as routes out of campus prove hard to find
- More than 1,000 have been arrested or have surrendered as sewers fail to provide an answer and other exits are cut off
Jumping into sewers, abseiling to a highway from a footbridge and climbing over walls – desperate radicals inside a Hong Kong university have done all they can to escape from police besieging the campus.
Only a few dozen people, including social workers and first-aid volunteers, were believed to be still inside Polytechnic University on Tuesday evening, after police blocked all exits from the Hung Hom campus on Sunday evening following a day of extremely violent clashes.
That was a much smaller crowd than Sunday, and according to police as of Tuesday afternoon about 1,100 had been arrested or surrendered.
In the early hours of Tuesday, several people were seen jumping down an underground tunnel through a manhole inside the campus in a bid to escape. But only about 10 minutes later, they climbed back out from another manhole.
“It was disgusting inside the drains,” one masked man said. “We resorted to doing so because we did not know how to seek help from the outside world.