Bookseller Lam Wing-kee may leave Hong Kong over safety fears
Lam Wing-kee considering move to Taiwan after disputing the credibility of a video released by Beijing authorities which appears to show him confessing
Bookseller Lam Wing-kee has revealed that he’s leaving the door open to move to Taiwan, even as he expects Hong Kong police to provide him with round-the-clock protection within a few days’ time.
“It’s a 50-50 chance. The police can’t protect me for the rest of my life,” he said in an interview with the Post on Thursday. “The government in Taiwan is a democratically elected one, unlike in mainland China.”
He also launched into a detailed rebuttal of a video released by Beijing showing his daily routine in detention and confessing to breaking mainland law by selling banned books across the border. Lam called it “forced confession” and said camera appearance had been choreographed by authorities.
After his explosive claims that he was nabbed by agents from a “central special investigative unit” when he crossed into Shenzhen last October and made to endure eight months of “mental torture” on the mainland, Lam has repeatedly complained about being tailed by unidentified people and his personal safety being under serious threat.
He told the Post he would leave Hong Kong if his family members and friends got into trouble because of him, detailing how he had been followed by “suspicious-looking strangers” on six separate occasions.
The bookseller, who is now a wanted man for skipping bail after returning home and refusing to go back to the mainland, also branded the release of the video as “smear tactics”.
He said his videotaped testimony, shown to a high-level Hong Kong government delegation in Beijing this week, featuring “forced confessions” that he was made to read from prepared scripts over and over again until the authorities were satisfied.
When he spilled the beans at a surprise press conference last month about his mainland ordeal, he said he had no plans to leave Hong Kong because the city was his home.
The police said it was not serious enough to warrant protection
That changed, he said, after he was followed by four strangers on June 29 all the way back to his hiding place in Lai King Estate in Kwai Tsing. He did not see the stalkers himself – but the owner of a photo printing shop claimed he did.
“The police said it was not serious enough to warrant protection,” Lam recalled. Police did a U-turn the day after the Hong Kong delegation secured a provisional agreement to improve the cross-border notification system that failed when Lam disappeared last year – but they insisted there was still no evidence he was in any personal danger.
The bookseller declined to go into details of his protection arrangements, saying only that police had not ruled out a 24-hour watch on him.
Police on Thursday stuck to their guns on the lack of evidence suggesting a threat, having said earlier that he could have been followed by journalists and curious people.
Lam was shown in the video admitting that he was breaking the law because the books were banned across the border.
On Thursday he insisted he was only reading out scripts prepared by a “director”.
Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung said police would compare the footage against what the bookseller said.
Lam told the Post he had read out confession scripts five to six times at a detention facility in Ningbo before the interrogators and their bosses in Beijing were satisfied. “The videos were live-streamed to Beijing,” he said. “The officers present told me Beijing was not satisfied with my confessions … almost immediately. They said I was not serious enough.”
The video also depicted him in apparently good spirits, at one point smiling and giving a thumbs-up to a hairdresser.
“What would you plead after you were confined for five months under triad-like circumstances?” Lam said. “There were no court procedures whatsoever.”
Lam said there were three sets of cameras monitoring him round-the-clock in custody.
Asked whether the selected clips featuring his meals and medical checks told the whole truth, he urged Beijing to “publicise all unedited footage” to tell the whole story.
The defiant bookseller also hit back at claims that his failure to return to the mainland was in violation of the bail conditions attached to his Hong Kong visit.
“I have committed no crime,” Lam said. “Is it legal to impose bail on someone after eight months of detention without due process?”
He also criticised the Hong Kong delegation for not chasing mainland officials on four of his publishing associates who also disappeared and later appeared on the mainland.
