HONG KONG: Hong Kong police said on Saturday that two people were arrested for sedition under a new national security law, accusing them of spreading hatred against Chinese and local authorities.

The arrests on Friday came only a day after the pro-democracy news outlet Stand News and two former editors were found guilty of sedition, the first conviction of its kind since the city came under Chinese rule in 1997.

Critics said officials in the Chinese finance hub had used the sedition offence, which has roots in British colonial rule, to target government critics and stifle dissent.

A man aged 41 and a 28-year-old woman were arrested on Friday for committing "an act or acts that had a seditious intention" and remained in custody, police said in a statement.

Hong Kong media reports said the arrests were made in connection to a note widely circulated on social media this week after a university professor was killed on railway tracks.

The author expressed suicidal thoughts due to despair over Hong Kong's future.

AFP was unable to verify the identity of the person who wrote it.

Police said the woman was suspected of "publishing fraudulent 'last words' of the deceased in relation to a recent suicide case".

They said the man was accused of placing "memorial light boxes" in various places, with contents "provoking hatred" of the governments in Beijing and Hong Kong, police said.

The new national security law, passed in March and commonly known as Article 23, increased the maximum jail term for sedition from two years to seven.

It is Hong Kong's second national security law and follows the one imposed by Beijing in 2020 after huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests a year earlier.

Those protests prompted a crackdown on free speech that has seen critics of China jailed or forced into exile

The United States and Britain are among vocal critics of the new law, which they say has curbed rights.

By Aug 1, 301 people had been arrested for national security crimes under various laws.

 - AFP