Seven victims of an indiscriminate attack by a mob of white-shirted men at Yuen Long MTR station in July are filing claims for compensation with the police, saying the force was well aware of the risk of violence and did nothing to avert it.
The group includes Democratic Party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, who told reporters at a press briefing yesterday morning that he and his party have collected evidence from dozens of witnesses that police knew about the July 21 attack in advance.
The group accused the police of failing to deploy enough manpower to the station that night, and also want the MTR Corp to release CCTV footage of the vicious onslaught.
Lam said that the group didn’t want a huge amount of money from the lawsuit, saying: “We just want the truth.”
“What happened in Yuen Long on July 21 was a terrorist attack. If police don’t explain it clearly and comprehensively, and don’t apologize to the people of Hong Kong, the attack will remain as a black spot on the reputation of police forever,” Lam said.
Police took more than half an hour to respond to emergency calls from the station, where thugs — some with triad links — brutally beat demonstrators, journalists, and terrified commuters inside the station, and even in a stopped train. Authorities later admitted that they had been tipped off to the possible attack hours earlier, but had categorized it as “low risk.”
Even after police arrived at the scene in force, numerous videos from the night show them declining to take action against armed men believed to have taken part in the attacks. The response was so widely panned that Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption launched an inquiry into the possibility of wrongdoing on the part of the force.
Reporters yesterday heard testimony from some of the witnesses of the attack, including a 60-year-old woman surnamed Lam, who is also party to the suit, and who said she was taking the MTR to her home in Tin Shui Wai on the night in question. Her train stopped at Yuen Long just as the attack was happening.
“When the train doors opened, I saw a group of young people running into the train and holding the doors open yelling ‘there are triads downstairs hitting people, can someone help us?'”
Lam said that she walked out of the train and over to a set of stairs to see what was going on, only to come upon the group of men in white attacking people as they went up the stairs.
She said that she turned around to flee, but couldn’t run fast enough and tripped, and that her legs hurt afterwards.
Triads randomly beating citizens in Yuen Long MTR, yet NO police arrived on site one hour after citizens called 999 emergency line.#HongKongProtest #FreedomHK #antiELAB pic.twitter.com/7GEoqaf6ls
— Freedom HK (@FreedomHKG) July 21, 2019
“I was so scared. After I got to the top of the stairs, I didn’t know what to do; I wanted to run but couldn’t,” she said.
Lam said she got back into the train and headed to Tin Shui Wai, where she decided to make a police report, but found that police had closed the station’s shutters — as they had at the Yuen Long office as well.
“I didn’t think the police would pull down the shutters; I never thought Hong Kong would be like this. What reason did they have for doing that?”
Lam said that she didn’t seek treatment for her legs until a few days later, with her general practitioner asking why she didn’t go to the hospital right away.
“I said it’s because I was really scared. The police closed their door to us; I didn’t go to the hospital because I thought, ‘What if they close the door on me too?'”
She now uses a wheelchair to get around, and told reporters she’s still in a lot of pain, even after taking painkillers, and that she also needs to see a psychiatrist.
The incident, often referred to as “the 721 attack” by local media and protesters, took place as many anti-government protesters were returning home from a major rally on Hong Kong Island that evening. It also came a little over a week after a representative of Beijing’s liaison office, the central government’s outpost in Hong Kong, had called on Yuen Long residents to “protect” their town from protesters at a banquet thrown by a local organization.
So far 30 people have been arrested in connection with the attack, of which only four have been charged with rioting.
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