A former Hong Kong civil servant has been jailed for 12 months for threatening to burn down the newsrooms of the South China Morning Post and five other media outlets if they refused to publish seditious material he had created to frame the husband of his former girlfriend.
West Kowloon Court on Tuesday heard the guilty pleas from Tse Chun-pan, 43, who had set up a website selling merchandise themed around the 2019 anti-government protests and demanded that six local media publish screenshots of a page containing the seditious content.
Tse, a former social security officer with the Social Welfare Department, admitted to listing his love rival’s phone number as the seller’s contact on the website.
The victim, whose identity was withheld, is married to a woman Tse briefly dated in 2015.
The court heard that between 2016 and 2018, the victim had been repeatedly targeted by an unknown person who posted his photo and harassed him on an online forum, and even filed a false report to the Independent Commission Against Corruption accusing him of fraudulently obtaining sick leave.
The victim, who even received paper funeral effigies after his child was born in 2018, believed Tse was behind the harassment.
Last June, six media outlets – including the SCMP, The Standard and China Daily – received a threatening letter warning them to comply with the requests to publish the screenshots.
