HONG KONG: Hong Kong police on Thursday entered a ransacked university campus where authorities faced off for days with barricaded pro-democracy protesters, gathering a huge haul of petrol bombs and other dangerous materials.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University became the epicentre of the territory’s increasingly violent protest movement when clashes broke out on Nov 17 between police and protesters armed with bows and arrows as well as Molotov cocktails.

The standoff settled into a tense stalemate during which hundreds fled the campus — some making daring escapes, others caught and beaten by officers during failed breakouts — leaving a dwindling core of holdouts surrounded by police cordons.

But in recent days, the last few people barricaded in the campus seemed to disappear. University staff said they were only able to find a single protester on campus and reporters there struggled to see any major presence in the last 48 hours.

There was no sign of them on Thursday morning when police and firefighters moved in, 11 days after the siege began, for what was billed as an operation to secure dangerous objects now littering the once placid campus and to collect evidence.

During the Nov 17 battle, the sheer volume of petrol bombs thrown by protesters succeeded in stopping police officers and crowd control vehicles from breaking through the barricades, forcing the stalemate that led to the siege.

Molotovs

Explosives experts went from room to room followed by a gaggle of reporters, passing walls daubed with graffiti insulting the city’s police force and calling for greater freedoms under Chinese rule.

Officers gathered a rapidly growing pile of items in a courtyard, from half-full jerry cans of petrol, to Molotovs made out of wine bottles and various chemicals in brown glass bottles.

Crime scene investigators could be seen dusting multiple objects for fingerprints, including cars parked in a basement that had been emptied of petrol from their tanks.

Police later said they had recovered nearly 4,000 “petrol bombs”, over 550 bottles of corrosive chemicals and 12 bows with 200 arrows, among other items.

They said an operation to secure dangerous items on campus would be finished on Friday, when they expect to remove a police cordon that has blocked entry and exit to the university for days.

Police spokesman Chow Yat-ming said the priority for Thursday’s operation was not the arrest of any holdouts who might still be hiding.

Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2019