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Hong Kong (China), March 24 (EFE).- An American lawyer who remained imprisoned for assaulting a policeman in Hong Kong has declared that he has been taken to the airport and deported from the city after being released from prison.
Samuel Phillip Bickett, former director of anti-corruption compliance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, assured this Wednesday in a statement published through the social network Twitter that he has been expelled from Hong Kong after completing his prison sentence.
Bickett explained that the Hong Kong immigration authorities refused his request to “close his affairs and say goodbye to his loved ones” and that he was transported from the Stanley maximum security prison directly to a detention center, from which he was taken Tuesday to a flight to Washington with a stopover in Turkey.
“My arrest, trial, appeal, my two imprisonments and my deportation have made it clear that there is no longer a real concept of ‘rights’ in Hong Kong. The police are in charge at the behest of Beijing,” Bickett told Efe.
The thirty-something American was sentenced by a court in the former British colony to 4 and a half months in prison in July 2021 for assaulting Yu Shu-sang, a plainclothes policeman, during a brawl that broke out in a subway station on the city in December 2019.
During that time, the Asian business center was still convulsed by an anti-government protest movement that lasted for months in that year.
The court was informed that Bickett stepped on the policeman’s chest and hit him in the face, while Bickett’s defense lawyers claimed that the American was trying to prevent Yu from attacking a young man who had jumped the turnstile at the subway station. .
Bickett did not know Yu was a police officer, the defense argued.
During the protests, many young people jumped the turnstiles in the metro stations without paying a ticket in protest against the supposedly favorable position of the metro system operator with respect to the local government.
The US citizen, who has lived in the semi-autonomous region since 2014, insists he was wrongfully convicted and his imprisonment was “politically motivated.”
After serving six weeks of his sentence in August 2021, he was released pending an appeal, which he lost in February this year, for which he had to return to prison to complete his sentence.
Likewise, Bickett explained on his Twitter account that, upon his arrival in Istanbul, the Turkish authorities held him and his passport at the airport for eight hours.
“The Turkish police officers who detained me told me that they were responding to a ‘routine request’ from the Hong Kong government,” Bickett told Efe.
The Hong Kong Immigration Department had not responded to questions from Efe at the time of publication of this news.
At the beginning of last March, the British Paul Harris, a prominent human rights lawyer and former director of the Hong Kong Bar Association, left the territory hours after declaring that he had been summoned for a meeting with the new police unit to charged with enforcing Hong Kong’s recent National Security Law.
This law, created in 2020, provides for sentences of up to life imprisonment for cases such as secession or collusion with foreign forces.
(c) EFE Agency