Police say there is no record of him leaving HK, but wife suspects mainland officers grabbed him and says he phoned her on the night he vanished
PHILA SIU, STUART LAU AND EMILY TSANG
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 03 January, 2016, 12:55am
UPDATED : Sunday, 03 January, 2016, 12:59am
Lee Bo (above left), a police officer at Causeway Bay Books in Lockhart Road, and the office of the store’s owner, Mighty Current.
The mystery over the disappearance of a Hong Kong bookseller who specialises in books critical of the Chinese Communist Party has deepened, with the police saying there is no record of him leaving the city but his wife claiming the bookseller called her from Shenzhen on the day he went missing.
Lee Bo, 65, a majority shareholder in Causeway Bay Books, vanished on Wednesday, just weeks after four associates disappeared in strange circumstances.
“The police told his wife that the force did not find any records of him leaving Hong Kong,” a police source told the Post yesterday.
Lee’s wife said her husband called her from Shenzhen the night he disappeared. “He said he will not be coming back anytime soon. He said he was assisting an investigation. I asked him if it was about the previous cases, he said yes. It was about the missing [associates],” she told Cable TV.
“He later called me again and asked me not to make a scene. I guess it was the Shenzhen police.”
Mrs Lee found it strange that her husband talked to her in Putonghua instead of Cantonese. She said the caller ID was a Shenzhen number. She suspected that Shenzhen officers had taken her husband from Hong Kong.
When Lee said “Shenzhen”, Mrs Lee said he struggled to finish the sentence and she had a feeling he was told not to say anything more. She heard a voice in the background saying “there would be no problem if you co-operate”.
Local media quoted Mrs Lee as saying that she found Lee’s home return permit at home. He called again yesterday and when Mrs Lee said “Let me talk to them”, the phone was immediately hung up.
According to other reports, police told her he left the publishing house’s Chai Wan warehouse alone with a bag of books. CCTV footage showed he used a lift he did not usually take.
His disappearance is the fifth case related to the bookstore. Gui Minhai, owner of Mighty Current, the publishing house that owns the bookstore, went missing while on holiday in Thailand.
Missing person reports were made on three others: bookstore manager Lam Wing-kei; general manager of the publishing house Lui Bo; and business manager, Cheung Jiping. Police classified them as “missing persons”.
Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said the police were already looking into the case. The Security Bureau said that it would not comment on “speculative reports”.
Under the Basic Law, mainland officers have no right to exercise the law in Hong Kong, let alone make arrests.
Democratic Party lawmaker Albert Ho Chun-yan believed that Lee was “abducted” by mainland officers.
Former secretary for security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said mainland officers had never crossed the border to carry out covert law enforcement during her tenure.
“But if the government has established what happened, it should ... seriously handle the matter and find out if the mainland had made arrests,” she said.
In a letter to Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Raymond Tam Chi-yuen, legal sector lawmaker Dennis Kwok said: “If proven, the incident would deal a fatal blow to ‘one country, two systems’ and Hong Kong’s judicial independence.”
The Independent Commentators Association and the Hong Kong Journalists Association have written to Tam, the central government’s liaison office director, Zhang Xiaoming (張曉明), and Guangdong’s head of public security, Li Chunsheng. They demanded to know if Lee had been taken away by mainland officers.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1897704/missing-bookseller-called-shenzhen
