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Ip Yut Kin, the chief executive of Apple Daily, Mr Lai's pro-democracy newspaper, said the "barbaric act" was an attack on press freedom.

Monday's incident is the latest in a series of violent attacks on figures linked to Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement.

In February last year Kevin Lau, the liberal former editor of Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper, was left fighting for his life after being set upon by two men, one with a meat cleaver.

Speaking at an emergency House of Commons debate on post-handover Hong Kong last month, Ann Clwyd, Labour MP, described that attack as part of a growing trend of violence and intimidation targeting the former British colony's journalists.

"Mr Lau had been abruptly fired a month beforehand by the paper's owner, a tycoon with major investments in China, and replaced by a new editor who was widely seen as more pro-Chinese," the British MP noted.

Jimmy Lai, who was born in Mainland China but moved to Hong Kong as a boy, has long been a thorn in Beijing's side.

His Apple Daily tabloid has thrown its full weight behind the former colony's pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, which began last September, and Mr Lai himself frequently lambasts China's Communist leaders.

"It's not mainland China that rubs me up the wrong way, it is the dictatorship that rubs me up the wrong way," he told CNN in 2009. "It's the freedom that we Chinese people are not allowed that rubs me up the wrong way."

Last month the 66-year-old tycoon was one of dozens of pro-democracy activists to be detained when Hong Kong police cleared a sprawling protest camp near the former colony's financial centre.

"I am happy to be arrested," Mr Lai told The Telegraph before he was taken away by officers.

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