Lee Po returns home quietly, denying he was kidnapped and asking police to cancel their missing-person investigation
PHILA.SIU@SCMP.COM
UPDATED : Thursday, 24 March, 2016, 7:48pm
The man at the centre of Hong Kong’s missing bookseller controversy returned to the city on Thursday and asked for the missing-person investigation into his case to be scrapped, police said.
Causeway Bay bookseller Lee Po, who vanished last December and later surfaced on the mainland, again told them he did not need their help, police said.
It was the same with two of Lee’s associates – Cheung Chi-ping and Lui Por – when they returned to Hong Kong earlier this month after disappearing last October.
All of them claimed they had gone to the mainland of their own free will to help with an investigation into the smuggling and sale of banned books, dismissing concerns that they had been kidnapped and spirited across the border by Chinese law enforcement agents.
On the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said the central government was aware that Hongkongers were very concerned about Lee’s case.
“The SAR government has consistently been transparent in handling the incident,” he said, before the police statement was issued. “We have spared no effort in reflecting [concerns] to the mainland.”
Police said the Immigration Department was informed by its Shenzhen counterpart on Thursday that Lee would return to the city. Upon crossing the border at the Lok Ma Chau checkpoint, he talked to immigration and police officers, again denying he had been kidnapped.
There is no official record of his leaving Hong Kong.
Since October last year, five associates of the Mighty Current publishing house and Causeway Bay Books store went missing one after another in mysterious circumstances.
Gui Minhai was the first to vanish in Pattaya, Thailand, in October. Lam Wing-kee, Cheung and Lui also disappeared that same month while on the mainland.
That was followed by Lee’s disappearance in December.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1930052/missing-hong-kong-bookseller-lee-po-returns-home-mainland
