'Mob Action' At Airport Draws Heavy Criticism

Protesters who prevented passengers from checking in and attacked two people they accused of being spies or undercover police came under heavy criticism on Wednesday morning, with some callers to an RTHK programme calling for a curfew to be imposed in the city.

Callers flooded RTHK's The Millennium show and a majority said that the actions of some demonstrators at the airport on Tuesday were too much.

Some said the situation overnight was brought about by the police tactic of using undercover officers to infiltrate protesters, which resulted in demonstrators becoming suspicious of one another.

Listeners described some of the people tying up the pair they suspected to be mainland police officers and preventing them from getting medical treatment as 'mob behaviour'.

Some callers said they had taken part in the airport protest in the past few days and the situation on Tuesday was similar. Some demonstrators had tried to set aside channels for passengers to board the plane, but because there were too many people, it became chaotic, they said.

The callers accused the Airport Authority of not deploying more staff to coordinate, resulting in physical confrontations between the two sides.

A post on Facebook by a journalist who tried to prevent the mob from attacking one suspected mainland undercover officer attracted thousands of comments, and was shared over 12,000 times by Wednesday morning.

In his post, Richard Scotford said he stepped in to save the man as he "could not stand by, or even walk away from a man being beaten to a pulp". He also said he took some knocks in the process but was not seriously injured.

Hours later, in another post, he criticised the mainland media, saying his comments were being "used... to discredit the movement".

Footage of the two attacks has gone viral on mainland social media and drawn thousands of angry comments about the attacks on two mainland people, one of whom is a Global Times journalist.