Hong Kong bookseller disappears: police say no record of him leaving — wife says he called from Shenzhen and 'will not be coming back anytime soon'
Police say there is no record of him leaving HK, but wife suspects mainland officers grabbed him and says he phoned her on the night he vanished
The mystery over the disappearance of a Hong Kong bookseller who specialises in books critical of the Chinese Communist Party has deepened, with the police saying there is no record of him leaving the city but his wife claiming the bookseller called her from Shenzhen on the day he went missing.
Lee Bo, 65, a majority shareholder in Causeway Bay Books, vanished on Wednesday, just weeks after four associates disappeared in strange circumstances.
“The police told his wife that the force did not find any records of him leaving Hong Kong,” a police source told the Post yesterday.
Lee’s wife said her husband called her from Shenzhen the night he disappeared. “He said he will not be coming back anytime soon. He said he was assisting an investigation. I asked him if it was about the previous cases, he said yes. It was about the missing [associates],” she told Cable TV.
“He later called me again and asked me not to make a scene. I guess it was the Shenzhen police.”
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Mrs Lee found it strange that her husband talked to her in Putonghua instead of Cantonese. She said the caller ID was a Shenzhen number. She suspected that Shenzhen officers had taken her husband from Hong Kong.