Police are on the hunt for two men caught on CCTV throwing what appeared to be two petrol bombs at the Kowloon home of media tycoon Jimmy Lai in the early hours of Thursday morning.
According to HK01, a security guard at Lai’s mansion on Kadoorie Avenue, Ho Man Tin, called officers at 1am after seeing two men throw throw bombs at Lai’s house before fleeing on a motorbike.
Video uploaded by Apple Daily, the best-known outlet owned by Lai, shows two masked in black shirts park a motorbike up the street, then walk towards Lai’s home with a plastic bag. On arriving in front of the home, they appear to set the contents of the bag on fire and chuck it at Lai’s front gate before running off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J6qqQaAc4s
Firefighters out out the blaze shortly afterwards. No one was hurt, and no arrests have been made so far.
Lai is the founder of media company Next Digital, which publishes the outspoken pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, along with a handful of other titles, including Next Magazine. Lai is known to donate very generously to pro-democracy parties and campaigns, and has been an outspoken supporter of Hong Kong’s long-running pro-democracy protest movement.
This is not the first time he and his newspaper have been targeted. In 2015, molotov cocktails were thrown at Lai’s gate and Apple Daily‘s office in Tseung Kwan O. Two vans that were spotted at the time of the incident were later found set alight in Shek Kip Mei and Cheung Sha Wan.
In another, slightly more bizarre, incident in 2014, a man hurled animal entrails at Lai while he was visiting the Umbrella Movement occupation site in Admiralty.
Also around the time of the Umbrella Movement, someone paid a newspaper to run a full-page ad carrying a fake obituary of Lai saying he died from “AIDS and multiple cancers,” and knife-wielding masked men poured soy sauce over copies of Apple Daily at the paper’s distribution centers.
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