BBC top official dubs China's blocking of the news agency's English-language website as "deliberate censorship" following the circulation of videos of Hong Kong police assaulting pro-democracy protesters over the Internet.

BBC Global News director Peter Horrocks said that the British news company will be complaining in what had been deemed as an "attempt to restrict free access to news and information," emphasizing that the news agency has continuously provided "impartial, trusted news to millions of people around the world" for decades.

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"Attempts to censor our news services show just how important it is to get our accurate information to them," Horrocks said in a statement.

Though it remains unclear as to why the website had been blocked in the country, several reports linked it to the circulation of footages showing six plainclothes Hong Kong officers beating and kicking a handcuffed and unarmed pro-democracy protester hours before access to the site had been cut off in China.

Upon hitting the worldwide web, the video released by Hong Kong's TVB ignited outrage from civil rights advocates and calls for prosecution of the officers in question.

The co-founder of GreatFire.org, an anti-censorship group, Charlie Smith had confirmed reports of the block that occurred on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, TVB has maintained its Chinese audience though the video had become inaccessible.

In December 2010, BBC had also been blocked from being accessed in China a few days before Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize award.

Taking to Twitter, Jo Floto, Asia Bureau Chief for BBC, said that Chinese officials have "usual practice of blacking out BBC World during Hong Kong reports" in an attempt to aggressively oversee China topics deemed sensitive, including the criticisms on the government as well as the country's human rights record.

The Bloomberg and the New York Times also experienced China's censorship after they published details of the probe on the family wealth of President Xi Jinping and former premier Wen Jiabao respectively back in 2012.

TagsBBC, block, censorship, Hong Kong, Hong Kong pro-democracy