News Digest

Clashes as ‘500 masked men’ rush Hong Kong protest barricades

Masked men rushed barricades at Hong Kong’s main pro-democracy site Monday, triggering clashes as demonstrators tried to push them back and police struggled to contain the chaos. Groups of men, many wearing surgical masks, descended on the front lines of the rally at Admiralty near Hong Kong’s central business district, hours after police had moved in to remove some barricades and shrink the site. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said about 500 masked men rushed the barricades.Two of the men were tackled to the ground by police, who also formed a cordon around the masked group. Protesters, who have come under attack from organised crime gangs known as triads at another flashpoint rally site in Mongkok, shouted: “Weapons! Weapons!” and “Arrest the triads”. Television footage showed one masked man being forced to drop a small flick-knife.

They don’t want to clear everyone today. They want to make the protest area as small as possible to open roads to traffic.

Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong chief executive

Meanwhile, Chinese police have detained two Beijing activists who took part in a Hong Kong pro-democracy march, a friend said Monday, the latest of dozens of arrests over the protests. China has in recent weeks held around 40 people on the mainland who had expressed support for the universal suffrage protests in Hong Kong, according to rights groups. Zhang Xiuhua and Li Lirong, both middle-aged women, were detained by police last week on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, their friend Zhou Li told AFP, citing a police notice. The vague charge of “picking quarrels” has been increasingly used by Chinese police to hold human rights lawyers and activists in recent months.