Ex-legislator did not break law by revealing ICAC inquiry into police officer, Hong Kong court hears

An investigation into alleged misconduct by a Hong Kong police commander on duty during a mob attack at a railway station two years ago was not required to be kept secret given the substantial public interest involved, a lawyer defending a former politician who disclosed the details has argued in court.

Ex-legislator Lam Cheuk-ting, 44, appeared at Eastern Court on Wednesday to face three counts of disclosing the identity of people under investigation after he exposed an inquiry by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) into Superintendent Yau Nai-keung following the violence at Yuen Long MTR station on July 21, 2019. Lam has denied all the charges.

Yau was an assistant commander in Yuen Long when more than 100 white-clad men, most of them armed with rods and rattan canes, left at least 45 people injured in an attack widely regarded as a turning point in the escalation of tensions between police and radical protesters during the social unrest that year.

After a preliminary investigation that night, Yau told the press his team had found no rods in a village where most of the assailants had gathered after the attack and noticed nothing criminal. He became a regional commander in the northern New Territories after the incident.

Lam, of the opposition Democratic Party, held three press conferences between December 2019 and July last year, during which he accused police of spreading lies and delaying an investigation into the attack.

Lam revealed on those occasions that Yau was being investigated by the anti-graft agency for possible misconduct in public office, and he slammed the force’s decision to allow the officer to lead an inquiry into the attack while his integrity was being questioned.

“It is absurd that the [police] commissioner assigned a main suspect [of a misconduct inquiry] to investigate the other suspects of the case,” Lam was recorded as saying.