The Hong Kong government was responsible for the plight of 12 Hongkongers captured at sea by Chinese coast guard, given its deployment of a helicopter that appeared to be monitoring the group’s movements at the time, one of their family members said.

The 12 had been detained in Shenzhen since being arrested while en route to Taiwan in a speedboat in August. On Wednesday, a Shenzhen district court sentenced 10 of them to jail terms of between seven months and three years over charges of illegal border crossing.

The remaining two, who were underage at the point of arrest, were handed over to Hong Kong police. A concern group helping the 12 youths said that police officers repeatedly obstructed lawyers from meeting the pair after they were taken from Shenzhen to a Hong Kong police station.

Meanwhile, one of the affected families said the Shenzhen convictions were unjust. “It is wrongful to jail them for even only one day,” the father of Cheng Tsz-ho said. Cheng was jailed for seven months.

Cheng’s father said the Hong Kong government had a role in the arrests because a government helicopter seemed to be tracking the group’s vessel on that day.

Decisions reached via the mainland trial were unconvincing as it was a closed-door affair and operated under an opaque system as a whole, the sister of another defendant, Li Yu-hin, told Apple Daily. She said she believed that the 12 had been forced into admitting their offenses.

The father of Li Tsz-yin said the seven-month term imposed on his son was more severe than expected. Li’s father said he was inclined not to appeal because doing so might add uncertainty to his son’s case. “Things in the mainland can be capricious,” he said.

The brother of Tang Kai-yin, who received the longest sentence, of three years in jail, said it was hard to accept the worse-than-expected outcome. His family hoped to visit Tang in the mainland and would need to learn about the procedures, he said.

In its verdict, the Yantian District People’s Court said Tang and Quinn Moon acted on the arrangements of others to organize the escape attempt to Taiwan. Tang bought a boat. He and Quinn contacted the other 10 people on Aug. 23 and told everyone to meet at a pier in Hong Kong’s Sai Kung before they all boarded the boat for Taiwan, the court said.

Tang and Quinn were accomplices to other people, who were not among the defendants, and their sentences had been mitigated, the court added.

Separately, the Hong Kong government said it would not make arrangements for the families to visit the 10 inmates in the mainland. The city’s representative office in the mainland could give them advice and information, as well as relay their requests to mainland authorities, a spokesperson for the Security Bureau said in a reply to Apple Daily’s inquiry.

The 10 would also be unable to serve out their custodial sentences in Hong Kong because the city had no such legal arrangements with the mainland, the spokesperson added.

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