At about 5am one day this week, I was woken by a tremendous crash immediately outside my home in Kam Tin. Not an unusual occurrence, as this stretch of long, relatively straight New Territories road is very popular with small-hours speed demons and a car smash every couple of months is usual. In this accident three tragically died and four others were critically injured.
The next day, horrific close-up photographs of fatally injured young people were splashed across the front pages of Hong Kong's leading 'popular' dailies.
Having lived many years in Hong Kong, I have long since ceased to be appalled by the double standard of a society - and administration - that allows such disturbing images to be freely and often unwittingly viewed by all ages. A published photo of a bare human body is somehow deemed unacceptable where one of a badly mutilated, dead one is not.
Yet it was the apparent complicity of the emergency services with press photographers that truly shocked me. I was on my verandah seconds after the crash occurred, and clearly saw everything that went on.
First on the scene was a police motorcyclist. Next to pull in were the photographers. About 10 minutes later the first of several ambulances came. This sequence of events is correct. The press cameras were there before the ambulances. Presumably the paparazzi listen in to the police radio frequency and send flying squads, or are otherwise tipped off. They surely weren't 'just in the area' at 5am on a weekday. Kam Tin is not Causeway Bay.
Firemen had to cut apart the wreck to release the injured, and then the photographers were everywhere. Neither police nor emergency services made any attempt, as far as I could ascertain, to move them away or tell them to desist. And as a Cantonese speaker, I could understand what was being said to them - and not said.