Hong Kong (AFP)

A tense new face-off took place Saturday in Hong Kong between police and radical protesters who erected a barricade in a street.

The former British colony, which has been experiencing its worst political crisis since June since its return in 1997 with daily demonstrations, had experienced several days of lull after the violence observed there are ten days.

But the situation on Saturday was particularly tense in the popular Kwun Tong neighborhood in eastern mainland Hong Kong.

After marching through the neighborhood, thousands of protesters, many with gas masks and hard hats, were blocked by dozens of riot police not far from the Ngau Tau Kok police station.

Protesters erected across a street a barricade made of plastic barriers used for traffic and bamboo stems used to make scaffolding in the construction industry.

Numerous insults came from the ranks of the demonstrators towards the police, in the center for weeks of protestors' anger, accusing them of violence.

After weeks of essentially peaceful mobilization, protests escalated in late July and early August in clashes between radicals throwing stones or bricks and the police force making massive use of tear gas and bullets. rubber.

There was also a beating during an action at the airport of two mainland Chinese suspected of being spies in Beijing, which generated on the side of the authorities and in the official media Chinese terrorism accusations and more and more threats of intervention from China.

Last Sunday, in response, a great peaceful march was organized in the former British colony, gathering 1.7 million people according to its organizers.

"I have never seen Hong Kong in such a situation," Dee Cheung, a 65-year-old protester on the sidelines of Kwun Tong's face-off, told AFP on Saturday.

"Young people who are outside are putting their future at risk for Hong Kong," he said.

"We do not agree with everything they do, especially with those who charge the police, but we also have to ask why they do that."

The mobilization left in June for the rejection of a Beijing-backed local executive bill to allow extradition to China.

The movement has since considerably expanded its demands.

burx-apj / jac / bds

© 2019 AFP