British Foreign Secretary says bookseller removed from HK under duress

HONG KONG – British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Friday that a Hong Kong bookseller who disappeared from the city under mysterious circumstances late last year had been removed under duress, and that the business community was “unnerved”.

Lee Bo, the bookseller and British passport holder, disappeared last December from Hong Kong and surfaced in China almost three months later. He has since returned to Hong Kong and said he had not been kidnapped by Chinese authorities as many suspect.

He has also said he would renounce his British citizenship.

Hammond was speaking to journalists in Hong Kong, a former British colony which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.

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AFP, Reuters