Hong Kong arrests newspaper editors for 'foreign conspiracy': Report

5 journos held, $18-mn assets frozen; China warns media outlets, hails move

Hong Kong arrested the three most senior editors at Jimmy Lai’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper along with two top executives for suspected breaches of its sweeping national security law and ‘foreign conspiracy’, generating fresh concerns about diminishing press freedom in the former British colony.

Those arrested (total 5) included Next Digital Chief Executive Officer and Apple Daily publisher Cheung Kim-hung and Chief Operating Officer Royston Chow, as well as the paper’s Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law and deputy editors Chan Pui-man and Cheung Chi-wai. Around 500 police officers descended on the newspaper’s Hong Kong headquarters on Thursday morning, with Apple Daily tweeting that police officers were accessing journalists’ computers.

“The action taken isn’t related to normal journalistic work,” John Lee, Hong Kong’s security secretary, told reporters on Thursday. “The action targeted the use of journalistic work as a tool to engage national security. Normal journalists are different from these people. Please keep a distance from them.”

Lai, who founded Next Digital, has been the most high-profile target of the government’s push against democracy advocates in Hong Kong. He is currently serving more than year in prison for attending unauthorized protests and faces additional charges under the security law that China imposed on the city last year. On Thursday morning, trading of Next Digital shares was halted, without any reason being given. Mark Simon, a top adviser to Lai, confirmed the arrests and said the police were falsely labeling the paper’s top three editors as company directors in order to mask the fact that authorities were now using the security law to arrest journalists.

Assets frozen

In a press conference outside the newspaper’s offices, Hong Kong Police Force National Security Department officer Li Kwai-wah said the police had frozen HK$18 million worth of assets belonging to three Apple Daily companies. The newspaper had published dozens of articles that gave foreign powers “ammunition” to sanction Hong Kong and China, Li said, adding the newspaper office was now a crime scene and the warrant allowed them to seize and access digital devices.

The move is the latest effort by Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to quell any form of dissent in the city, which was rocked by sometimes violent anti-China protests in 2019. The government has used the national security law -- which bars subversion, terrorism, secession and foreign collusion — to detain dozens of prominent pro-democracy activists, lawyers and politicians, many of whom were denied bail and are now being held in jail before trial on subversion charges for seeking to win a local election and vote down the government’s budget.

China took another step toward extinguishing any form of dissent in Hong Kong, hailing police in the cityand warning journalists not to write articles that challenge Beijing.