Hong Kong alerted within 15 days in over 90pc of case of residents in trouble on mainland, lawmakers told
But city’s security chief, Lai Tung-kwok, says there is no specific time frame and it may not apply at all to missing bookseller Lee Po
National security authorities alerted Hong Kong within 15 days in over 90 per cent of the more than 12,000 cases in which the city’s residents were detained or died of unnatural causes on the mainland, lawmakers heard on Tuesday.
But Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok said there was no specific time frame set for a notification to be made, nor was Lai sure that the reciprocal notification system would apply to the controversial case of missing bookseller Lee Po, formerly reported as Lee Bo.
Pan-democrats on the Legislative Council’s security panel said the slow progress of Lee’s case had made a mockery of the notification system, worked out by Hong Kong and the mainland. Since its launch in 2001, over 12,000 notifications involving more than 9,400 Hong Kong residents were made by the mainland authorities to Hong Kong.
READ MORE: Serving Hong Kong police officers hit out at missing booksellers investigation
Most of the cases involved fraud, smuggling and drugs.
Weeks after Lee was reported missing in Hong Kong amid speculation that he was abducted by mainland law enforcers, Hong Kong police received a reply from their Guangdong provincial counterparts on January 18, briefly stating that “having understood that Mr Lee Po is in the mainland”.
Lai said Hong Kong police had written to Guangdong to request a meeting with Lee. But so far there had not been a reply.
Commissioner of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung rejected accusations that the force had been too passive, saying: “It is only less than eight days [since January 18]. I don’t believe our hands are tied ... We will continue our proactive inquiries [to the mainland authorities].”
Lo, however, suggested that Lee’s wife, who had reportedly met her husband in a guest house on the mainland over the weekend, had been uncooperative, saying she had refused to tell police even where they had met.