Hong Kong police dust down a Molotov cocktail bottle for fingerprints at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong on November 28 2019. Picture: AFP/ANTHONY WALLACEHong Kong police entered a ransacked university campus where authorities faced off for days with barricaded pro-democracy protesters, gathering a huge haul of petrol bombs and other dangerous materials left over from the occupation.
But there was no sign of them on Thursday morning when police and firefighters moved in, 11 days after the siege began, for what was billed as an operation to secure dangerous objects now littering the once placid campus and to collect evidence. Officers gathered a rapidly growing pile of items in a courtyard, from half-full jerry cans of petrol, to Molotovs made out of wine bottles and various chemicals in brown glass bottles. Crime scene investigators could be seen dusting multiple objects for fingerprints, including cars, with their petrol tanks emptied, parked in a basement.