The children of jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英) are voicing new alarm for his health, saying his condition has continued to deteriorate.
Lai, who turns 78 next Monday, has been behind bars since late 2020 as China clamps down on the financial hub to which it promised a separate system when Britain handed it over in 1997.
Lai, a diabetic, has been kept in solitary confinement without air conditioning in a jail where summer temperatures were as high as 44°C, his children said.
Photo: AFP
"He has lost a very significant amount of weight, visibly, and he is a lot weaker than he was before," said his daughter Claire Lai (黎采), who left Hong Kong after seeing her father several months ago.
"His nails turn almost purple, gray and greenish before they fall off, and his teeth are getting rotten," she told AFP on a visit to Washington, where the family is seeking to rally support for her father.
She said that guards refused to let her father, a devout Catholic, receive communion and that they made small gestures to try to demoralize him.
After learning he enjoyed curry sauce, "instead of having extra curry sauce, he has no curry sauce at all," she said.
"It's little things like that that are extremely petty," she said.
A successful businessman, Lai founded the Apple Daily, an outspoken pro-democracy tabloid.
He faces at least 15 years in prison on charges of foreign collusion related to mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019 against the city’s government and Beijing.
His son Sebastien Lai (黎崇恩) voiced hope that both US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer would keep raising with China the issue of his father, who is a British national.
"It will take two hours to put my father on a plane and send him away," Sebastien Lai said.
"It'll be the humane thing to do; it'll be the right thing to do," he said. "They've already put him through this hell."
In response, the Hong Kong government yesterday said in a press release that it strongly condemned "certain media," including AFP, “for their fact-twisting reports” concerning the case under the Hong Kong National Security Law involving Jimmy Lai, as well as the treatment and medical services provided by the government during his detention.
"These reports seek to smear the Hong Kong government by misleading the public into believing that the custodial and medical arrangements for Lai have been poor," it said.
During the public court hearing in August this year, senior counsel representing Lai clearly presented to the court that the correctional institutions had been arranging daily medical checkups for him and that there had been no complaints at all regarding the medical services he was receiving, it said.
The Correctional Services Department has also arranged dedicated chaplains to provide religious services to Lai in accordance with his wishes, it added.
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