HONG KONG: China claims it released bookseller abducted from Pattaya

Gui is one of five booksellers who disappeared in late 2015 and the last of the five to remain incommunicado.

HONG KONG: Sweden said Tuesday it has been notified by Chinese authorities of the release of detained Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, a naturalised Swedish citizen who went missing two years ago.

“We have received information from the Chinese authorities that (Gui) has been released,” Swedish Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Sofia Karlberg said, without specifying when he was freed.

“Welcoming official Chinese information about release of (Swedish) citizen Gui Minhai. Still occupied (with) the matter and seeking further clarification,” Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallstrom said on Twitter.

But Gui’s daughter Angela was quick to cast doubt on the release of her father.

“While we have been told #GuiMinhai has been released he is NOT free,” she said on Twitter. “(Gui) has been disappeared again, likely by the Chinese government.”

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He appeared on Chinese state television in January 2016, where he said he had voluntarily returned to face punishment for a fatal car accident in 2003.

Gui owned publishing house Mighty Current and a bookstore that sold titles about scandals among China’s ruling elite. He gave a confession on China’s state television three months after his disappearance, claiming he fled China in 2006 over a fatal traffic accident in which he was convicted of killing a woman and that, out of remorse, he decided to surrender to Chinese authorities voluntarily.

Gui would have served a two-year sentence for the alleged traffic crime last Tuesday, according to his daughter.

Gui’s four other colleagues had also been detained in mainland China, including bookstore manager and British citizen Lee Po, who was said to have been abducted by mainland agents from a Hong Kong warehouse in December that year, shortly after Gui’s disappearance.

Lee, who also gave a televised interview claiming he was assisting mainland authorities in an illegal book sale investigation involving Gui, has upon returning to Hong Kong denied being abducted and said he travelled to mainland China without going through customs by his own means.

Two other colleagues were released after they agreed to testify against Gui over the alleged illegal book sale, while one, Lam Wing-kee, jumped bail when he was allowed a brief return to Hong Kong in June 2016.

The disappearances of the booksellers prompted fears in Hong Kong — the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule 20 years ago — that Chinese agents allegedly crossed the border and kidnapped at least one of them from the semi-autonomous territory.