What's Still Killing Us This Week!

Well, guess you've heard by now that the "Acid Bomber" the HK police caught the other day ... wasn't.  It was just some illegal immigrant who heard the police coming and raced up to the roof to hide, so was spotted, grabbed and held by angry local residents of one of the apartments in the vicinity, until the police turned up to arrest him.

So yet again, Acid Bomber walked away.  Man, is this guy lucky or what?

In 13 months, there have been 251 folks he's splattered with acid, hospitalising over 50 with serious injuries, and the police still have no idea who he is.

This is just me thinking aloud, but I think it's most odd that this guy is never caught on the police surveillance cameras.  Sure, police have increased the numbers all over his usual targets of Mong-Kok and Causeway Bay, yet he's always just out of frame. Is this guy really, really lucky or does it mean he knows the scope and range of those cameras and exactly where they're pointing? That means, doesn't it, that he has access to those cameras. Legally or illegally? I pondered for a while if all this isn't really just a sly excuse for the police to up HK's surveillance without the public objecting, but then decided it most likely wasn't and that this is all "lone gunman" stuff.

However, it got me thinking about police surveillance and how the last time it was BIG in the news was a few years ago and up over the border, in Shenzhen.  Remember that?  How Shenzhen equipped the entire city with the very latest in surveillance technology, with no civic space uncovered, yet it proved useless because the young cop in charge of the equipment at night was a pervy-type who pointed every camera into the bedrooms of couples having wild sex and at young women who changed clothes without closing the curtains.

I'm now wondering about this young pervy cop and what he's doing these days?  I doubt he'd have kept his job in the police force, and most likely wouldn't have stayed in China, because everyone knew him up there with the subsequent loss of face, etc, etc, so it's always possible he's come to HK with a chip on his shoulder and a desire for revenge etc, etc, etc.  And he'd know how to access the surveillance equipment, wouldn't he?

And, again thinking aloud, this fellow acid bombed that housing estate up in New Territories, just across the border from Shenzhen, immediately after the police published the profile which called him "an anti-social computer geek with no people skills and a grudge". Since "A.B." usually bombs shopping areas with heavy pedestrian traffic, I think this 'N.T. event' was an unplanned and telling aberration; an immediate and vengeful "I'll show you" response to reading that report, which means he lives somewhere close-by; that he most likely walked to the nearest tall building and dropped his acid bombs at the first people he saw pass beneath him: a father taking his young son out to play in the housing estate's playground.

How wrong is that? I find it hard to imagine worse! What a horrible person A.B. is! 

Anyway, the police have upped the reward to HK$1.5 million, so "feisty Hong Kong" will be organising itself with even greater efficiency. As I mentioned before, in this latest bombing residents in all the apartments around the crash site ran out in numbers to block off all the exits to their buildings while others raced up to the roof to grab and hold whoever was up there, while, at ground level, other folks raced out with water to wash off the victims.  This is good to see, isn't it!  I do so love Hong Kong.


But anyway, this HAS to be my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Cops who arrest the first

cowering illegal immigrant

and don't look further for suspects.

However, the good news in all this is that this justifies buying that gorgeous Italian full-length black leather coat I've had my eye on for some time.  I mean, how can I NOT? It's a safety thing, la?

Later:

Italian leather 

and PERFECT!

Got it.  But, despite making me look like a Nazi storm-trooper, it's so gorgeous that if Acid Bomber so much as gets a drop on it, I'm "storm-troopering" after him myself.