Booze Queen… better not hang out in Mongkok next time you go to HK…
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Dec 15, 2008
46 hurt in HK acid attack
HONG KONG – POLICE here were investigating yesterday after dozens of Christmas shoppers were burned by bottles of acid hurled from a high-rise building onto one of the city’s busiest streets, a report said.
Police said 46 people were injured in a deliberate attack as two large plastic bottles of caustic liquid crashed to the ground in the teeming Mong Kok district at about 5pm on Saturday, said the Sunday Morning Post.
Witnesses said the victims, mostly youngsters, screamed out and rushed to find water to wash off the liquid, which burned holes in their clothes and damaged their skin. Some men simply stripped.
‘A bottle came down,’ one man told the paper. ‘It looked like an ordinary bottle of water, and the crowd began to disperse. Then I saw people with red faces and eyes in pain.’
The victims, including 26 women and girls, were scalded in their limbs, eyes, face or body, according to the Chinese-language Wen Wei Po. All the victims had been released from hospital by the end of Saturday, the report said.
Police said they searched the building from which the 750ml bottles appeared to have been thrown, but had not arrested any suspects.
Police superintendent Annie Fonda told the newspaper: ‘Judging by the traces and the positions of the two bottles, this is not an accident. We believe someone intentionally hurled them from a height.’
The liquid has been sent to a laboratory, and the police have not yet determined what it is, said police spokesman Leona Leung.
Witnesses suspect the liquid is acid drain cleaner, one of the most hazardous household products available to the public.
The thrower, if convicted of attempting harm on the lives of others, could face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, Supt Fonda said.
Mong Kok has often been a site of random attacks, the other famous case being the brick-throwing incident four years ago, the Wen Wei Po pointed out. The brick thrower was sentenced to 21/2 years in jail, it added.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS
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