by Edmond Ng and Sara Cheng
HONG KONG, December 29 (Reuters) – Hundreds of police raided the offices of the pro-democracy news website Stand News on Wednesday and arrested six people for alleged “seditious publications”.
Stand News, created in 2014 as a non-profit organization, is the last major pro-democracy publication in Hong Kong, following the closure of the Apple Daily tablod.
The police said in a statement authorized to “search and seize all relevant journalistic material”.
“More than 200 police officers took part in this operation,” he added.
Police said in a separate statement they arrested three men and three women, aged 34 to 73, for “conspiring to publish seditious material”.
Stand News deputy editor-in-chief Ronson Chan, also chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, was not arrested but said police seized his computer, electronic equipment, press and bank documents his home.
Access to the premises of Stand News was partially prohibited and investigators took away dozens of boxes containing documents and material seized as evidence.
Sedition is not a crime under the new national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
Recent court rulings in Hong Kong, however, give the authorities leeway to use provisions of the national security law for facts prior to its adoption – notably laws dating from the British colonial era affecting national security.
Pro-democracy activists see China’s imposed national security law as a way to silence dissenting voices and restrict freedoms in the special administrative region.
Local media reported that former Stand News board members Margaret Ng, former Democratic parliamentarian Denise Ho, singer, Chow Tat-chi and Christine Fang, as well as former editor-in-chief Chung Pui- kuen and acting editor Patrick Lam had been arrested.
On Tuesday, Hong Kong prosecutors accused press mogul Jimmy Lai, already facing other charges under national security law and jailed for taking part in illicit gatherings, with “seditious publications”.
Jimmy Lai, 74, is the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, which ceased publication last June following searches by Hong Kong authorities which arrested executives and journalists from the Apple Daily and froze them. group assets.
(With James Pomfret, Joyce Zhou, Jessie Pang, Donny Kwok, Clare Jim and Marius Zaharia, edited by Tony Munroe and Marius Zaharia; French version Camille Raynaud)