Hong Kong police fired teargas and deployed a water cannon to try to clear a resistant band of protesters who occupied a university near the Tsim Sha Tsui district and blocked roads in the vicinity.
Police launched round after round of teargas and repeatedly sprayed a blue-dyed liquid toward the demonstrators holed up at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Streets surrounding the campus were littered with bricks and other obstacles to keep the police at bay. Protesters shielded themselves with umbrellas and lobbed petrol bombs as the overnight standoff stretched into Sunday afternoon.
On Friday, a five-day face-off between protesters and police at Chinese University of Hong Kong ended as the activists evacuated their makeshift fortress. Earlier, vice chancellor Rocky Tuan made a fresh appeal for demonstrators, who had built barricades and taken over a number of buildings, to leave the campus.
The city’s government is trying to step up measures to halt escalating violence in the financial center after a week that saw countless incidents of vandalism, angry clashes between opposing sides and two deaths linked to the conflict.
