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Activist gets 38-month jail term for possessing molotov cocktails, claims “my soul is free”

蘋果日報 2021/05/01 06:57


A former university student was sentenced to a 38-month jail term on Friday for being part of a group in possession of nearly 140 finished or semi-finished petrol bombs.
Yeung Wing-yu, 23, was originally charged with conspiracy to commit arson but later pleaded guilty to an alternative charge of “possessing anything with intent to destroy or damage property.”
In delivering the sentence, District Court Judge Eddie Yip said the punishment should take into account the large number of molotov cocktails seized and the potential danger they could have caused to the commercial and residential building where they were stored.
Yeung, then a third-year student in the Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics faculty at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was among five people who were arrested in November 2019 during a police raid on a flat in Wan Chai. That was at the height of the pro-democracy protests that saw many violent clashes between protesters and police.
In the biggest seizure of its kind during the protests, police found 59 petrol bombs and 79 semi-finished petrol bombs along with a quantity of bomb-making materials.
Yeung had been in custody for nearly 18 months before her sentencing. In a letter presented to the court, the student said she committed the crime because “the more I found out, the more I felt our society is full of injustice.”
“The only thing I can do is to bear the legal consequences … the biggest loss to our society is the loss of trust,” Yeung wrote, adding that she has “freedom in her soul” despite her current ordeal.
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