I Didn't Flee To Boost Rally Turnout: Lam Wing-kee

Former Causeway Bay bookseller Lam Wing-kee said on Monday that it is "ridiculous" for a pro-Beijing newspaper to suggest that he fled Hong Kong last week to boost the turnout for Sunday's march against proposed changes to Hong Kong's extradition laws.

Organisers said some 130,000 people took to the streets against the government's proposals, compared to 12,000 when they held a rally on the same matter in late March. Police said there were "22,800 protesters at the peak" of Sunday's march.

Speaking on RTHK's Millennium programme from Taiwan, Lam said he had actually planned to go to the island by the middle of this month.

But he said the Taiwanese authorities had given him his visa late, and this was followed by the Easter holidays, so he only managed to leave last Thursday.

Lam also said that he expected that the fugitive law changes would be passed sooner or later, so it was safer for him to leave in advance.

The bookseller had said that Hong Kong is not safe for him anymore as he believed he would be "the first to be extradited" to the mainland, once the legal changes are passed.

Lam was charged by the mainland authorities with selling banned books after he went missing for weeks.

According to Lam, he was allowed to return to Hong Kong in June 2016 to collect "evidence" for mainland officials. He decided not to comply, and instead went public about how he had been kidnapped by mainland security officials at the Shenzhen border eight months before, and then held in secret detention in the Zhejiang city of Ningbo.

Four of his colleagues – Lee Bo, Gui Minhai, Lui Bo and Cheung Ji-ping – had also disappeared the same year and they also eventually resurfaced on the mainland.

Gui still remains on the mainland. The rest have returned to Hong Kong but either denied being ill-treated on the mainland or refused to talk about what had happened to them.