Edward Snowden In Hiding, Reaching Out To Hong Kong Rights Group For Legal Help, Hong Kong Media Reports

Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who has been on the run since identifying himself as the man behind leaked details of a U.S. surveillance program, may be seeking legal help in Hong Kong, local media reported on Wednesday.

Snowden has been trying to contact human rights groups and lawyers since he checked out of a Hong Kong hotel on Monday, the Oriental Daily News, a Hong Kong-based Chinese language newspaper reported without identifying its sources, according to Bloomberg.

Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor said it has not received any message from Snowden, the paper said.

Whereabouts of the 29-year-old who had been employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, a U.S. defense contracting firm that works with the National Security Agency, continue to be unknown after he left the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district on Monday around noon.

Another Hong Kong newspaper, Apple Daily, reported, citing unnamed sources, that the local immigration department had no record of Snowden departing the city.

A spokesman for the department told Associated Press that it could not confirm news reports about Snowden because it did not comment on individual cases.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, who is on an official visit to New York, declined to respond to reporters’ questions on Tuesday regarding how his administration would handle Snowden’s case.

“I have no comment on individual cases,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian reporters who interviewed Snowden regarding his revelations, wrote late on Tuesday that “it is thought” Snowden is now in a private home in Hong Kong, AP reported.