A new tense face-off took place Saturday (August 24th) in Hong Kong between police and pro-democracy protesters. Riot police charged protesters who had erected a barricade in the popular Kwun Tong neighborhood in eastern mainland Hong Kong and fired tear gas to disperse them.

At least one of the protesters was arrested when security forces intervened against demonstrators who were throwing bottles at them, according to an AFP journalist there.

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

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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.

"I have never seen Hong Kong in such a situation"

After several weeks of mobilization, essentially peaceful, demonstrations have increasingly degenerated in late July and early August in clashes between radicals throwing stones or bricks and the police making massive use of tear gas and bullets made of rubber.

"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.

With AFP