HONG KONG: Hong Kong police arrested six people on Tuesday (May 28) under the city’s new security law for “posting messages with seditious intention” online.
Five women and one man were arrested for “posting messages with seditious intention on an anonymous social media page since April 2024”, the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force in a statement.
One of the women arrested was already on remand in a maximum-security women’s prison, the police said.
Security chief Chris Tang confirmed that the woman on remand was Chow Hang-tung, a prominent activist who has been jailed since 2021.
He also said that the Facebook page in question was the “Chow Hang-tung Club”.
Chow was the former leader of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance, which had organised an annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to mourn the victims of Jun 4, 1989, when Beijing sent troops into Tiananmen Square to quash protests.
Tuesday’s arrests come a week before the event’s 35th anniversary, and the statement said that the online posts were “taking advantage of an upcoming sensitive day”.
The online messages were written “with the aim to incite hatred towards the Central Government (Beijing), the HKSAR Government and the Judiciary, as well as inciting netizens to organise or take part in unlawful activities at a later stage”.
The six people – aged between 37 and 65 – were “suspected of violating section 24 of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which reads ‘Offences in connection with seditious intent’,” the statement said, referring to Hong Kong’s newly enacted law.
It would be the first such arrests under the law, commonly referred to as Article 23.
