Rampaging protesters reduced Hong Kong’s streets to charred battlefields on Saturday, setting off multiple fires and hurling petrol bombs at riot police who fought back by firing rounds of blue dye from water cannons and tear gas, as the city marked yet another weekend of heightened violence.
Police fired two live rounds into the air to fight off a violent mob near Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, sources told the Post, as word spread of undercover officers mingling with the demonstrators.
The incident was just one of many shocking turns of the day on the 13th straight weekend of protests in the city.
Across various locations, elite “raptors” from the Special Tactical Squad fought pitched battles in smoke-filled streets with hard-core protesters, or chased after them, wrestling some to the ground as they made on-the-spot arrests.
Hard-core elements took their criminal acts to new extremes by lighting bonfires of cardboard and other flammable material, rubbish bins and any junk they could lay their hands on as they moved from one district to another leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, almost always a step ahead of police.
Defying a ban on demonstrations, they took over roads and mounted makeshift barricades from behind which they hurled bricks and petrol bombs at police lines.
They first began by besieging police headquarters in Wan Chai, throwing petrol bombs at the heavily barricaded building.
At one point, they surrounded the equally barricaded government headquarters and the Legislative Council compound, hacking down a fence with metal poles and throwing bricks at riot police standing watch inside, as others flashed laser pointers at officers.
By night-time, the demonstrators fanned out across the harbour to Kowloon, doing a flash mob protest in the tourist hub of Tsim Sha Tsui, setting off more fires along the main shopping artery of Nathan Road and its side streets.
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Rampaging protesters reduced Hong Kong’s streets to charred battlefields on Saturday, setting off multiple fires and hurling petrol bombs at riot police who fought back by firing rounds of blue dye from water cannons and tear gashttps://t.co/AWtnulErt5
— POLITICO (@politico) September 1, 2019
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