HONG KONG – Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy activist, said police raided his private offices earlier on Thursday. This comes months after he was held on suspicion of violating the new national security law imposed by Beijing.
The tycoon said the police did not wait for his lawyers to arrive and seized documents from his office.
“They just wanted to get something to go against me,” he said outside a court complex where he went for a hearing over unlawful assembly charges in connection with this year’s June 4 commemoration of China’s brutal 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
“That’s not rule of law,” Lai said. “They just took everything.”
His aide Mark Simon tweeted the police did not leave any names or contacts of the 14 officers who conducted the raid.
The media mogul was arrested in August on suspicion of colluding with foreign elements as 200 cops searched the offices of his Apple Daily, which is an anti-government tabloid. They also conducted a search on his yacht.
He has not been charged.