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Hong Kong Democracy Activist Denied Entry to Malaysia


FILE - The leader of Pro-Democracy students Joshua Wong watches as police officers remove barricades, Hong Kong, Oct. 14, 2014.
FILE - The leader of Pro-Democracy students Joshua Wong watches as police officers remove barricades, Hong Kong, Oct. 14, 2014.

Malaysian authorities have denied entry to Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong, one of the main organizers of last year's pro-democracy protests that riled Beijing.

Wong posted on his Facebook page Tuesday that a Malaysian immigration official denied him entry because of a "government order." The 18-year-old activist did not elaborate.

Malaysian customs officials have not commented on the incident, which is reported to have happened on the northern Malaysian island of Penang.

Wong was scheduled to speak at a series of seminars on the grassroots democracy movement in China and Beijing's 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square.

He is the founder of Scholarism, a group that played a major role in organizing last year's protests that demanded Beijing allow fully democratic elections in 2017.

At one point, tens of thousands of protesters blocked several key roads, providing the biggest challenge in decades to Chinese rule of the territory.

Beijing and Hong Kong officials refused to give in to the protesters' demands, instead declaring the gatherings illegal and forcibly breaking them up.

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