Here are the main points from Day 14 of the trial:

  • During Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, Tong Ying-kit helped people who were hit by the police’s pepper spray and blue dye, his former employer said.
  • Tong was supposed to meet the employer and other colleagues for lunch on July 1, 2020, the day he allegedly rammed his motorcycle into police.
  • Prosecutors looked for flaws in research conducted by a journalism professor.

The first defendant under Hong Kong’s national security law took care of people who sought refuge in a Mong Kok takeaway drink store after they were injured in nearby protests in 2019, his former employer told the High Court on Thursday.

Tong Ying-kit, 24, later befriended the proprietor and was engaged to help tend the shop, the court heard on the second last day of his trial. “He was fired from his last job and seemed upset… I said, ‘If you have no job, you can come and I’ll hire you’,” Royaltea shop owner Jessica Kong said, adding that her patrons nicknamed him “Heavy Armour” while she preferred “Leon”.

Kong, speaking as a defence witness, offered a rare glimpse into Tong’s personal life, which has largely remained out of the public eye as he has chosen not to take the stand. Tong is accused of driving a motorcycle bearing a protest slogan into a group of policemen on July 1, 2020, in Wan Chai. He has been charged with terrorism and inciting secession, with an additional fallback charge of dangerous driving.

The defence earlier pointed out that Tong was carrying first-aid supplies on the day of the collision, and on Thursday, it drew on the fresh testimony to reinforce the point that he had experience giving medical care.

Kong told the court that, on the day of the incident, she was planning to have lunch in Causeway Bay with the defendant, their colleagues and other friends working in the restaurant business. Tong never arrived.

Prosecution and defence lawyers said they had finished calling witnesses, and will present their closing arguments to the court next Tuesday.

Tong’s former boss recalls him taking care of the injured while protests raged on.

Kong was a late addition to the defence’s roster of witnesses. Appearing in court on Thursday afternoon, she recalled first meeting Tong in late 2019 when he began patronising Royaltea. He was a regular customer starting from February 2020 and the two became friends, she said.

Protests were constantly breaking out in the neighbourhood, and during that time, Tong would go into the shop “to rest or get something to drink”, she said. Other people would take refuge inside as well. “Some were hit with pepper spray or blue-coloured liquid,” she added, referring to the police’s crowd-control chemicals.

“Did anyone look after them?” defence counsel Clive Grossman SC asked.

“Yes. One of them was Tong Ying-kit,” Kong replied, though she said she was too busy tending to the store to notice what Tong did. The Royaltea premises were open to the public, and she would not pay attention to what people were doing as long as they did not affect her business, she added.

Judges stopped Grossman from asking Kong whether she had heard about the defendant’s first-aid training and experience, saying that the court could not rely on hearsay evidence. 

Kong said she offered Tong a job around April 2020 after his dismissal, coinciding with the time when Hong Kong was dealing with an early wave of the coronavirus pandemic. His job title was “tea-making attendant”, but in fact he had to multitask as the shop was very small, she added.

Tong was nicknamed “Heavy Armour” by patrons of the store, Kong said. “As I recall, I specifically asked him whether he had any other name, because as an employer I didn’t want to address him as ‘Heavy Armour’. He told me to call him Leon.”

Tong was supposed to meet his boss and colleagues for lunch on July 1, 2020, the court hears.

At around 1.35pm on July 1, 2020, about two hours before he drove his motorcycle into the police, Tong sent a WhatsApp voice message to his boss: “Can you send me the location on Lockhart Road?” The message carried the voice of Tong, asking for the Causeway Bay restaurant where they were due to have lunch. 

Kong said the lunch appointment involved Tong, their colleagues, and friends working at Daikatsu Don, a Japanese restaurant close to Royaltea. Some members of the group, excluding the defendant, split into two cars to drive across the harbour from Kowloon to Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island, she continued.

Traffic jams along the way held up the cars, and around 2pm, Kong sent a photo to Tong showing a police roadblock at the Western Harbour Crossing. Prosecutor Ivan Cheung suggested that the picture was meant to let the defendant know there were roadblocks, but Kong disagreed. The group eventually arrived in Causeway Bay around 2.30pm; Tong allegedly told his former boss he would drive over by motorcycle, but he did not show up.

Prosecutors also floated the idea that one of the lunch attendees, identified only as Carmen, was in fact a WhatsApp user going by the name “Dinosaur BB”, who had communicated with Tong before the collision. Kong replied that she did not know, but revealed Carmen was the person in charge of Daikatsu Don. In addition to hiring Tong for her own store, she had referred him to Carmen to work at the Japanese restaurant, she added.

According to the prosecution, Dinosaur BB allegedly discussed with Tong his route to Causeway Bay and whether he was “too late” for an event not specified in court. Dinosaur BB also sent him images, including one of police displaying a purple warning flag to caution the public that they were breaching the national security law, and a photo depicting a person next to a flag in a store. 

Prosecutor Cheung also pointed to WhatsApp messages shown as being deleted on the defendant’s phone. Kong said she had removed a message sent to Tong in error on July 2, 2020.

Journalism professor defends his research into LIHKG forum posts.

Earlier in the day, journalism professor Francis Lee elaborated on his research findings that the correlation between the protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” and Hong Kong independence was “weak, or moderate at most”. 

Lee was explaining a report he co-authored with another defence witness, which Tong’s lawyers were using to argue that Hongkongers had varied interpretations of the slogan, as opposed to it being a literal call for separatism from mainland China.

Lee said he collected posts from the public affairs channel of the LIHKG online forum between June 2019 and July 2020, and analysed the number that mentioned certain keywords on a given day. That figure was expressed as a percentage of all posts from the channel on the same day, an indirect reflection of how popular those keywords were. Lee’s research team would then compare the percentages across different keywords, to come up with a “correlation coefficient”, he said.

“You cannot exclude the possibility that, at the time you tried to analyse the posts, some will be removed,” said Acting Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Anthony Chau.

Lee replied that it was a very minor proportion. “Even if 10,000 posts had been removed, that would not affect the overall outcome because we had 25 million,” he said.

Prosecutors also challenged the fact that, apart from his LIHKG research, Lee’s other studies into the language of the protests did not cover the full period between the slogan's use starting in July 2019 and Tong’s collision about a year later. Lee said he had made an honest attempt based on the data on hand.  

“As a social scientist, indeed sometimes I cannot prove everything. But in late 2019, we already found that [the slogan] meant different things. Whoever comes out to say that, six or seven months later, the slogan can only mean one thing and that thing is independence — I would say… give me the evidence,” Lee told the court. “I don’t see it.”

 

By Holmes Chan

 

Day 1: Hong Kong’s first national security suspect Tong Ying-kit goes on trial

Day 2: Police fired pepper balls at Tong Ying-kit’s speeding motorbike, court hears

Day 3: Role of police arm shield in Tong Ying-kit crash under question in court

Day 4: ‘I had a feeling’ Tong Ying-kit meant to flee after crashing, says injured policeman

Day 5: Tong Ying-kit’s slogan is about ‘taking back Hong Kong from enemy’, professor tells court

Day 6: Slogan creator Edward Leung wanted to ‘build a nation for Hongkongers’, court told

Day 7: Trial debates Tong Ying-kit’s perception of ‘Liberate Hong Kong’ slogan

Day 8: Lawyers caught unawares as slogan evidence can’t be found in middle of hearing

Day 9: Tong Ying-kit purposely avoided hitting police with motorbike: defence

Day 10: ‘Liberate Hong Kong’ slogan was about uniting freedom-loving people, political scientist testifies

Day 11: Hong Kong protesters flaunted colonial flag in 2010s. What does it mean today? court asks

Day 12: National security judges sceptical of using group discussions to interpret slogan

Day 13: Prosecutors’ view on language too rigid, media scholar says at Tong Ying-kit trial