By Mike Ives, Ezra Cheung and Katherine Li :
HONG KONG – Antigovernment demonstrators angered by the shooting of a Hong Kong demonstrator fanned out across the city on Tuesday, blocking major transit arteries and staging a fiery standoff against riot police officers on the fringes of a university campus.
Protesters disrupted the morning commute and brought parts of the central business district to a standstill around lunchtime. At the gates of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, they set a giant blaze and threw gasoline bombs at police lines under a barrage of tear gas canisters.
The protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city began in June over a contentious, but since-withdrawn, extradition bill. The demonstrations have since morphed into calls for greater democracy and police accountability.
Here’s the latest on the Hong Kong protests.
Black-clad student demonstrators have been making a concerted effort to defend their campuses against what they see as unwarranted police encroachment.
On Tuesday, protesters at the Chinese University of Hong Kong built roadblocks outside an entrance while police officers elsewhere tackled demonstrators to the ground and fired tear gas at a group gathered on a sports field.
As the clashes escalated in the evening, the university’s vice chancellor, Rocky Tuan, sought met with students in hopes of brokering a cease-fire between protesters and the police.
“The deal is that we each need to take a step back,” he said as he urged the students not to escalate the confrontation. In response, the students shouted: “We don’t believe you!” They repeatedly interrupted him and called for the release of students who had been arrested.
Barely minutes after Mr. Tuan left the site, the police fired tear gas at the protesters.
The protesters poured more fuel onto a large barricade that they had already set ablaze. They hurled gasoline bombs, set off fireworks and chanted: “Reclaim Hong Kong, a revolution of our times,” a popular protest slogan.
Officers fired a barrage of tear gas over the blockade, sending protesters scrambling. At least 30 people were being treated in a makeshift first-aid center on campus, apparently for exposure to tear gas and injuries from rubber bullets.
Even though many confrontational protesters are undergraduates, violence on the campuses of Hong Kong’s universities has been rare. The university said that classes would be canceled on Wednesday for a third straight day in light of road blockages, “severe damage” to campus facilities and the “high risk of ongoing confrontation between protesters and the police.”
Hundreds of protesters, including many office workers, stormed Hong Kong’s central business district at lunchtime. Some formed human chains to pass along bags of bricks that front line activists were using to block traffic.
Across the harbor, activists in the Mong Kok neighborhood placed barricades in front of buses and punctured their tires.
The city’s subway operator said on Tuesday morning that services were also delayed after gasoline bombs had been thrown onto the tracks of a major rail line that runs to the border of the Chinese mainland.
Large groups of commuters were seen walking along the line’s tracks – a rare scene in a city known for its efficiency and order.
The demonstrations on Monday brought some of the worst violence that the city has seen in recent months. Mrs. Lam, the city’s leader, called the combative protesters “enemies of the people” and warned that the city’s escalating unrest could take it on the “road of ruin.”
A police officer shot a black-clad protester at point-blank range on Monday morning in a neighborhood where traffic had been snarled by roadblocks. Elsewhere, a man was doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire after he scolded protesters, video footage shows. The police have said they are treating the immolation as an attempted murder.
The medical status of the protester who was shot had improved to serious from critical condition by Tuesday morning, the Hospital Authority said. But the man who had been set on fire remained in critical condition.
Tensions in Hong Kong had been building after the death last week of a student who fell from a parking garage amid demonstrations.
The police said that 287 people were arrested on Monday, the majority of them students.
