Lam and his colleagues were knowingly breaking the law by selling large numbers of books that were unapproved by Chinese authorities, the officer said.
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Lam said he was seized on October 24 by a “central special investigation team” after crossing from Hong Kong into the neighboring city of Shenzhen in mainland China. The abductors gave him food, but refused to answer his question as to why he was detained. “I was taken to Ningbo city in Zhejiang province”.
It was only some time after he was first detained that he was told his detention was related to bringing banned books into the mainland.
While detained, Lam said Chinese authorities asked him to identify buyers, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to betray them.
They said they had sold 4,000 “unauthorised” books to 380 customers in mainland China, Phoenix TV reported.
He was supposed to return to the mainland on Thursday after being released on bail on Tuesday, he told reporters.
In March, Cheung Chi Ping, Lui Por and Lee Bo returned to Hong Kong and requested that police close their missing persons cases, saying they had traveled to China voluntarily and hadn’t been kidnapped. But on Thursday morning he said he spoke to Lee, who told him he had handed over names of at least 500 customers, a lot of them in mainland China.
Lee, who went missing from his workplace in Hong Kong on December 30, returned to mainland China after spending less than 24 hours in Hong Kong.
Lam was one of the minor characters in the saga of the missing booksellers, which gained worldwide attention because two other men involved had foreign citizenship and were suspected of being abducted by Chinese security agents working outside mainland China.
Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee stands before giving a news conference in Hong Kong Thursday, June 16, 2016.
“The Causeway Bay Books event touched the bottom line of Hong Kong people”, he said. This is about the freedom of Hong Kong people. “This isn’t about me, this isn’t about a bookstore, this is about everyone”. Many saw the episode as an expansion of China’s authoritarian legal system beyond its borders, in clear violation of the “one country, two systems” framework that allows Hong Kong to maintain a high degree of autonomy from Beijing.
Chinese authorities have declined to clarify key details of the disappearances but have said previously that law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal.
“If I myself, being the least vulnerable among the five booksellers, remained silent, Hong Kong would become hopeless”, said Lam, who unlike some of the others does not have family members on the mainland.
Democratic Party lawmaker James To Kun-sun said that Beijing government must give a full account of the event, or Hong Kong people would worry about their own safety. Lee Bo is a British national and went missing in Hong Kong, while Gui Minhai is a Swedish citizen and went missing while in Thailand.
While the other booksellers could follow suit by retracting their requests for case closure, Liu Ruishao, a Hong Kong News commentator, told VOA he doubted it was likely. He said the mainland authorities demanded he hand over his list of clients as a condition of his release.
“Sometimes the contents of these books may be no problem, but because of the publicity, publishers think it could be a problem, so they won’t publish it”, Liu Dawen, a Hong Kong-based publisher and president of “Sentinel” magazine, told VOA.
There he was held in solitary confinement for five months and interrogated about the publishing industry in Hong Kong.
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This report was produced in collaboration with VOA’s Mandarin Service.
