(ANSA) - HONG KONG, DEC 23 - The University of Hong Kong (Hku) confirmed today that the statue commemorating the people killed by Chinese troops in Tiananmen Square in Beijing has been torn apart and removed after 24 years.
"The decision on the old statue was based on external legal advice and a risk assessment for the best interest of the University," the institution said in a statement.
Hong Kong has long been the only place in China where the commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen events was tolerated.
Each year, HKU students cleaned the statue installed on their campus in 1997 to honor the victims of those events.
But Beijing has put its authoritarian stamp on the former British colony after the large and sometimes violent protests of 2019, by imposing a national security law that bans the commemoration of Tiananmen among other things.
In October, HKU officials ordered the removal of the sculpture depicting a tangle of 50 pain-deformed bodies, citing unspecified legal risks.
Lastatua was hidden from view last night, before being bolted this morning to be stored elsewhere, the university assured.
(HANDLE).