Hong Kong police faced criticism on Monday for an apparent failure to protect anti-government protesters and passersby from attack by what opposition politicians suspected were gang members at a train station over the weekend.
Sunday’s attack came during a night of escalating violence that opened new fronts in Hong Kong’s widening crisis over an extradition bill that could see people from the territory sent to China for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts.
Protesters had earlier on Sunday surrounded China’s main representative office in the Asian financial hub and defaced walls and signs and clashed with police.
Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leader, Carrie Lam, condemned the attack on the Central Government Liaison Office, saying it was a “challenge” to national sovereignty.
She condemned violent behaviour of any kind and said she had been shocked by the clashes at the station, adding that police would investigate fully. “Violence will only breed more violence,” Lam said while flanked by senior city officials.
Some politicians and activists have linked Hong Kong’s shadowy network of triad criminal gangs to political intimidation and violence in recent years, sometimes against pro-democracy activists and critics of Beijing.
Hong Kong has been hit by a series of sometimes violent protests for over two months – its most serious crisis since the city was handed back by Britain to China in 1997 but with democratic freedoms under a “one country, two systems” formula.
On Sunday night, scores of men in white T-shirts, some armed with clubs, flooded into the rural Yuen Long station and stormed a train, assaulting passengers with pipes, poles and other objects, according to video footage.
Witnesses, including Democratic lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, said the men appeared to target black-shirted passengers who had been at an anti-government march.
Lawmaker Lam, who was wounded in the face and hospitalised, said the police ignored his appeals to them to intervene to prevent bloodshed. “They deliberately turned a blind eye to these attacks by triads on regular citizens,” he told Reuters, saying the floors of the station were streaked with blood.
“I won’t speculate on why they didn’t help immediately.”
Forty-five people were injured in the violence at the station, with one in critical condition, according to hospital authorities.
Hong Kong police chief Stephen Lo, asked about concerns that officers had been slow to respond to the clash at the station, said there had been a need to “redeploy manpower from other districts”.
Some banks, shops and government facilities in the area closed early on Monday amid fears of more trouble, and few people ventured out on the streets, eyewitnesses said.
In 2014, Hong Kong’s anti-triad police units investigated triad gang attacks on protesters during pro-democracy demonstrations that shut down parts of the city for 79 days.
On Sunday, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse activists after thousands ringed Beijing’s Liaison Office. Police said protesters hurled bricks, smoke grenades and petrol bombs during the unrest that broke out after hundreds of thousands marched through the city streets.
The Chinese government, including office director Wang Zhimin, condemned the turmoil, which included spray-painting and hurling eggs at walls and a national emblem at the Liaison Office, saying the behaviour challenged the “authority and dignity” of the Chinese government.
A foreign ministry spokesman said such acts tested Beijing’s limits. “Some radical protester behaviour violated our bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’. We cannot tolerate that,” said spokesman Geng Shuang.
The unrest in Hong Kong marks the greatest popular challenge to Chinese leader Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012.
