Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee, who publicly recounted being abducted and detained by mainland Chinese authorities in 2015, has died at the age of 70 after a years-long battle with lung cancer, according to Taiwanese media.
Local media reported that Lam, who moved to Taiwan in 2019, was admitted to Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei on Tuesday, but his condition worsened and he fell into a coma.
He was pronounced dead on Thursday evening.
Last year, he disclosed that his lung adenocarcinoma had returned and advanced to stage four despite initial treatment.
After being allowed to return to Hong Kong in June 2016 to retrieve customer records, he approached then-lawmaker Albert Ho Chun-yan of the now-defunct Democratic Party, who helped him hold a press conference detailing his detention.
Lam said he had been kidnapped and blindfolded at the border and subsequently held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated, told to make televised confessions and denied access to his family and a lawyer.
The controversy prompted Hong Kong’s justice and security ministers to make a whirlwind visit to Beijing to learn details about the case and open talks with mainland officials on how to fix their cross-border system of mutual notification, as the city government had been kept in the dark for months over the booksellers’ disappearance.
