WASHINGTON: Hong Kong is a "police state" where officers – once dubbed "Asia's finest" – are conducting abuses in the service of the city's pro-Beijing leadership, prominent voices in the global financial hub's weeks-long protest movement told AFP on Saturday (Sep 21).
The comments came as riot police and demonstrators in Hong Kong fought brief skirmishes Saturday near the Chinese border.
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They were the latest clashes during more than three months of demonstrations to protest stuttering freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.
"Within these three-and-a-half months we have seen the police in Hong Kong getting totally out of control," activist and pop star Denise Ho said in an interview with AFP.
Hong Kong Cantopop singer and activist Denise Ho, posing after an AFP interview, says the city's police are 'out of control'. (Photo: AFP/Alastair Pike)
"Hong Kong has become a police state where the government is hiding behind the police force and refusing to find solutions to the present crisis."
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She and other well-known figures in the leaderless protest movement have visited the US, Germany, Taiwan and Australia to raise awareness.
"Our police system has been corrupted into a personal tool for Carrie Lam to maintain her power and to abuse the public power to torture the people, to silence the people," another activist, Brian Leung, said in the AFP interview.
He was referring to the leader of the former British colony, who was not directly elected but appointed by an overwhelmingly Beijing-friendly committee.
On Friday Amnesty International accused Hong Kong police of using excessive force.
Hong Kong pro-democracy activists unfurl a banner containing messages written during a rally outside the US consulate in Hong Kong on Sep 8, in front of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on Sep 21, 2019. (Photo: AFP/Alastair Pike)
"In an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong's security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests," said Nicholas Bequelin, the watchdog's East Asia Director.
"This has included arbitrary arrests and retaliatory violence against arrested persons in custody, some of which has amounted to torture."
Leung told AFP "there are countless incidents of such brutality and the worst of the situation is the police has systematically concealed their identity, are not showing their faces … which makes accountability impossible."
Millions took to Hong Kong's streets beginning in June but small groups of hardcore protesters have set fires, stormed the city's legislature, and hurled rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who have fired back with tear gas a
