



RELATED: 100s of protesters surround Hong Kong HQ before bill debate



Police fired tear gas and used pepper spray on protesters who had massed outside the government building overnight Tuesday and began pressing against the police early Wednesday.

The overwhelmingly young crowd had overflowed onto a major downtown road as they overturned barriers and tussled with police. But when some appeared to have breached a cordon around the building, the police launched their response.

At a brief news conference held as the chaos swirled just outside, Police Commissioner Stephen Lo Wai-chung said the "serious clashes" forced police to use pepper spray, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, and tear gas. He added that police were still counting how many people were injured.

Officers were also hurt, some seriously, by rocks, bottles, traffic cones, metal barricades and other items thrown by protesters.

Lo called the demonstration a riot. That could mean long jail terms for anyone arrested, adding to fears that Hong Kong's government is using public disturbance laws to intimidate protesters.



A curt government statement said a scheduled 11 a.m. legislative session would be "changed to a later time." Officials gave no indication of when that would be, and Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam canceled a news briefing.




The state of the legislative process for the bill remained unclear following the violence, which had largely ended by about 5 p.m. after police herded demonstrators across a pedestrian bridge. Traffic in one of the busiest parts of the city remained blocked, however, and several hundred protesters seemed in no hurry to leave.

The protesters said they hoped the blockade would lead to Lam's administration shelving the measure.


Another protester, who gave her name only as King, also out of fear of repercussions, said the protest was a watershed moment for Hong Kong's young generation.




"Most of these protesters don't expect the government to compromise. They just want to express their own opinions," said Joseph Cheng, a long observer of Chinese and Hong Kong politics now retired from the City University of Hong Kong. "The anger is still there and the anger will burst again at the next opportunity."



Speaking of her commitment to her job, her voice cracked as she said: "They said I'm selling out Hong Kong. How could I do that? I grew up here with everyone else in the city."

Lam added that she has never "felt guilty" over the issue and insisted she believed she was doing the right thing. She said she felt "worried and sad" about the young protesters on the streets, but said that as a parent to two sons, she believed it would be wrong to cave in to "willful behavior."


The government had pushed ahead with the extradition measure despite a weekend protest by hundreds of thousands of people in the largest political demonstration in more than a decade.

Lam said the legislation is needed to close legal loopholes with other countries and territories. A vote is scheduled on June 20.

At briefing Wednesday, China's Foreign Ministry repeated its support for the bill. Spokesman Geng Shuang also denied Beijing has been interfering in the city's affairs in a way that violates agreements made when Hong Kong was handed back to China.





Opponents of the proposed extradition amendments say the changes would significantly compromise Hong Kong's legal independence, long viewed as one of the crucial differences between the territory and the mainland.



Associated Press journalists Raf Wober and Alice Fung in Hong Kong, Johnson Lai in Taipei, Taiwan, and Sally Ho in Seattle contributed.