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Following is the transcript of remarks made by the Secretary for Security, Mr Lai Tung-kwok, at a media session at Central Government Offices, Tamar, after the Fight Crime Committee meeting this afternoon (July 19):
Secretary for Security: Overall speaking, the crime situation in the first five months of this year remained stable. Both the overall crime figure and violent crime figure have dropped. For example, the number of reported serious (violent) crime has dropped 6.2 per cent. Criminal intimidation dropped 11 per cent. Robbery dropped 21.5 per cent. On the other hand, blackmail, homicide, indecent assault have increased. Worthy of noting is that there were 53 homicide cases. The reason for the increase is that it has included 39 cases in the Lamma Island ferry collision tragedy as two captains were charged with the crime of manslaughter in April.
Reporter: (On the Snowden case.)
Secretary for Security: As regard to Mr Snowden's case, the Hong Kong SAR Government handled the case strictly in accordance with our law. As we all know that, Hong Kong is a society working under the rule of law. We have our legal system. All government officials in the Government must handle cases strictly in accordance with law. The US Government might have a different view on what has happened, but in the eyes of the Government and, I believe, in the eyes of the people of Hong Kong, acting strictly in accordance with law is of vital importance and people expect us, the Government, to handle each and every request accordingly.
Reporter: (On the increase in drug seizures.)
Secretary for Security: As you know that the amount of seizure, some of them have increased whereas others have dropped. The reason for the increase in seizure is really attributed to good intelligence gathering and co-operation with our foreign counterparts. In particular, I wish to emphasise that quite a lot of seizures were made by the Customs officers at the points of immigration entry. This has been successful because of the successful exchange in intelligence despite traffickers have been using quite different ways trying to bring along these drugs. But due to the good intelligence exchange system and mechanism, we were able to identify them and seized substantial amount. And this fully reflects the importance of having a kind of co-operation between all our counterparts in the world, not only our nearby regions, even further away in South America and so on.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Friday, July 19, 2013
Issued at HKT 19:06
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