Hong Kong police were forced to issue a clarification today over a video statement calling on unruly protesters to vacate the Legislative Council on Monday after netizens claimed it had been filmed hours in advance, lending credence to theories that police had allowed protesters to breach the premises as part of a premeditated trap.
Just after 10:20pm on July 1, about an hour after protesters managed to break down a glass door at LegCo and occupy the legislative chamber, police posted a video on Facebook of Chief Superintendent Tse Chun-chung of the Police Public Relations Branch condemning the break-in.
In the video, Tse announced that police would clear out the Legislative Council chamber, and urged any protesters still inside to leave the building immediately. He added that police would use “appropriate force” on anyone who did not leave the scene.
But in the hours after the video statement was posted, netizens quickly began circulating screengrabs of the video showing a close-up of Tse’s watch, which they maintained read 5:05pm, hours before protesters entered LegCo.
The screengrabs were posted on Reddit, adding fuel to claims that police — who had declined to intervene even after hours of escalating aggression on behalf of protesters — had effectively allowed protesters to occupy the LegCo chamber as part of some kind of trap.
Police is blaming the protesters who occupied the Legislative Council at 9pm. But his watch is in 5 o’clock. How can you know what will happen at 9pm? Is the script created by government to let protesters occupied? Who knows… do you?https://t.co/VHS1HcimN2#HongKong#antiELAB pic.twitter.com/crg0RV30r3
— winnielam (@winniekhlam) July 2, 2019
But in the early hours of this morning, Tse issued another video statement on Facebook in which he outlined the timeline of events and maintained that the image of his watch face circulated online had been photoshopped.
“We needed to take into account that in the Legislative Council chamber and the area around it there was more 30,000 people gathered. At around 10:05pm to 10:12pm, we filmed and edited a short video, then at 10:21pm we posted the video onto our Facebook page.”
The video then displays the widely circulated image of the watch purportedly reading 5:05pm side by side with an apparently higher-resolution shot of the same frame, in which the hands on the watch face are more clearly visible.
Another image showed the watch face itself, with the hands marked by color-coded labels: green refers to the hour hand, purple to the minute hand, blue to the second hand, and yellow to the other end of the second hand.
In the sharper images, Tse’s watch does indeed appear to read 10:05pm. In the image appearing to show 5:05pm, the watch’s hour hand is not visible, while the hand appearing to point to five o’clock actually appears to be the back half of the second hand.
In the new video, Tse goes on to say that shifting the blame for the violent incident at LegCo from protesters to the police was akin to “pushing the cart before the horse,” and added that it was “confusing and irresponsible” to modify a photo to implicate the police.
Earlier today, police also posted on their Facebook page photos of officers collecting evidence from the LegCo chamber one day after the legislature’s president, Andrew Leung, told reporters that the building had become “a big crime scene” after Monday night’s break-in and vandalism.
In the case of “any unlawful acts,” the post warns, “Police will certainly follow up and bring the culprits to justice.”
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