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 Three founders turned themselves in a day after calling on
students to retreat from protest sites in the Asia financial center
amid fears of further violence, just hours after student leader
Joshua Wong had called on supporters to regroup.
Pro-Beijing groups taunted Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu
Yiu-ming as they entered a police station just two subway stops from
the main protest site in Admiralty, next to the Chinese-controlled
city's financial center.
The three, accompanied by Cardinal Joseph Zen, 82, former Catholic
Bishop of Hong Kong, filled in forms, giving personal information,
and were allowed to leave without facing any charges.
"I hope we can show others the meaning of the surrender. We urge the
occupation to end soon and more citizens will carry out the basic
responsibility of civil disobedience, which is to surrender," said
Benny Tai, the most prominent of the Occupy leaders, after he left
the police station.
Police said 24 people aged between 33 and 82 had surrendered for
"taking part in an unauthorized assembly", and authorities would
conduct follow-up investigations based on the information provided.
 More than 100,000 people took to the streets at the height of the
demonstrations but numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, mostly
students, and public support has waned as the protests blocked key
roads and disrupted business.
Some students defied calls for them to retreat and vowed to stay put
at protest sites to press their call for free elections for the
city's next leader in 2017.
But Jean Pierre Cabestan, an expert in Chinese politics at Hong Kong
Baptist University, said the Occupy movement was "in tatters".
"The trouble and one of the weaknesses of the movement is there's
not much coordination between the Hong Kong Federation of Students
and the pan-democrats," he told foreign correspondents in Beijing.
The protesters are united in their calls for democracy for the
former British colony but are split over tactics, two months after
the demonstrations, also branded illegal by Beijing, began.
"Illegal demands cannot be granted, especially those expressed by
illegal and extreme methods," the overseas edition of the Chinese
Communist Party's official People's Daily said.
The Occupy call for students to pull back came a day after clashes
between police and protesters in Admiralty after activists tried to
ring government headquarters.
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Police charged into the protesters, raining down truncheon blows and
squirting jets of incapacitating "pava" spray. Scores of activists
and police were wounded.
Pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai said the students should
withdraw. "If (the protest) keeps dragging on, it will wear down
their willpower, which is exactly what Beijing wants," he told
reporters.
Authorities cleared protesters from the working-class district of
Mong Kok across the harbor last week, triggering running battles as
students tried to regroup.
A small group remains camped out in the busy shopping district of
Causeway Bay, but the bulk are in nearby Admiralty where students
have erected a makeshift village.
Hong Kong returned to Chinese Communist Party rule in 1997 under a
"one country, two systems" formula that gave it some autonomy from
the mainland and a promise of eventual universal suffrage.
Beijing has insisted on screening any candidates for city leader
first.
The Occupy Central movement had planned to lock down the heart of
the financial center around the first week of October but violent
clashes between riot police and students at the end of September got
the action off to an early start.
(Additional reporting by Joseph Campbell in HONG KONG and Ben
Blanchard and Sui-Lee Wee in BEIJING; Writing by Anne Marie
Roantree; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jeremy Laurence)
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