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Cliff Buddle

THE two kidnappers who murdered schoolboy Eddie Wong Wan-hin were branded 'cruel and evil' by a High Court judge yesterday as he jailed them for life.

Wong Wing-yuet, 20, and Yip Sun-on, 21, showed not a flicker of emotion as they were found guilty of what the judge described as one of the most calculated murders ever committed in Hong Kong.

They were also given 18 years' jail for kidnapping, which will run concurrently with the life sentences.

  Yip smiled as he walked to the cells, in marked contrast to the family and friends of the young victim who prayed and wept in court.

  The grieving relatives went straight to Eddie's grave in Pokfulam to bring him flowers and to 'tell him what has happened'.

  The guilty verdicts were returned by the jury after they had considered the case for more than 13 hours.

  Eddie Wong was lured away from his Happy Valley school, driven to Tai Mo Shan, throttled, and then suffocated after being dumped in a rubbish bag and tossed down a hillside. A ransom of $3 million was then demanded from his family.

  Mr Justice Stuart-Moore told his killers: 'That anyone could capture a child to obtain a ransom from his parents and decide to kill that child in order to avoid detection makes what you did so evil and so cruel that words simply fail to describe the enormity of your atrocious crime.'   Both Wong and Yip had talked of fleeing to China and lying low until the murder was forgotten.

  The judge said: 'Eddie was the life and soul, no doubt, of his parents lives and he was their only son. This merciless killing is something that they and their family will never be able to forget.

  'Yet you are both callous enough to think that what you have done can one day be forgotten. This was truly a crime without conscience.

'How anyone can contemplate, after long and careful discussions, what you did to that child, who was a blood relative of one of you, is nothing short of horrific. Seldom can such a calculated killing have taken place within these shores.'   The murder was committed so that Wong could get money to pay off debts resulting from his 'debauchery' in China and gambling in Macau, said Mr Justice Stuart-Moore.

  The judge commended the Regional Crime Unit based at Western for its excellent police work in tracking down the killers.

  He praised the jury for the care they had taken in considering the three-week trial and excused them from further service for 10 years.

  Wong and Yip had both pleaded guilty to manslaughter at the start of the trial. They denied murder.

  During the trial, defence barristers suggested that perhaps Eddie had not been killed by the defendants at all.

But the jury rejected claims that someone else might have killed the boy after Wong and Yip dumped him in the rubbish bag and threw him down the hillside.

  The legal situation which arose when a jury was told they could acquit defendants of a crime they had admitted, is extremely rare.

  But legal sources said the judge was right in his approach. The men had offered pleas of guilty to manslaughter which had been rejected by the prosecution.

 If the jury believed the men had pleaded guilty to a crime they had not committed it was open to them to return verdicts of not guilty.



Child killers get life