The police cannot not be trusted to verify the authenticity of an ATV news clip in a case concerning an alleged assault upon police by Civic Party member Ken Tsang, his defence counsel said on Wednesday.
Tsang, 40, has been accused of assaulting police officers with liquid from the embankment of an underpass on Lung Wo Road in Admiralty, and then resisting arrest during the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy protests. He has denied all charges.
At the Kowloon City Magistrates’ Court, Senior Counsel Robert Pang, for the defence, said that one of the clips was downloaded by a police officer from what he claimed was the website of ATV a month after the incident.
Pang said that none of the officers at the scene noticed any reporters on the scene and it is still unclear whether the footage is authentic, RTHK reported.
Pang also said that one of the police officers only remembered that he had lost his pepper spray after seeing the footage, which made him question how the officer could verify the authenticity of the footage if he relied on it to jog his memory himself.
Pang said that two police officers had mistaken each other for themselves from a still in a clip, and argued once again that they had actually signed each other’s statements by accident. However, the two officers denied the claims and said their signatures did not look alike.
The defence then said that the officers “were insulting the magistrate’s intelligence”, and that the footage should not be submitted as evidence, hk01 reported.
However, prosecutor David Leung Cheuk-yin, citing a precedent, said that so long as there was basic evidence to show that the clip was authentic, it could be submitted to court.
Magistrate Peter Law decided to adjourn the matter to Friday.
