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Alex Lo

Macau's main street was turned into a killing zone yesterday when hitmen on motorcycles shot dead three men in broad daylight.

 Governor General Vasco Rocha Vieira appealed for calm as police hunted for the killers.

 He urged residents not to lose confidence in the security forces' ability to fight organised crime.

 Yesterday's apparent execution of the three men suspected to have triad links brings to 13 the number of people killed so far this year in Macau's escalating gang war over lucrative gambling interests in the enclave's casinos.

 Shek Wing-cheung, 37, Fong Mou-hung, 33, and Lo Wing-hwa, 35, were repeatedly shot in the chest when two motorcyclists flanked their car and the pillion passengers showered them with bullets from both sides.

 They were travelling along the Avenida de Praia Grande in the city centre not far from the Lisboa at 5.30 pm when they were overtaken.

 The assassins rode away before the victims' vehicle had crashed.

 The attack came less than three weeks after children's nurse Rosa Yiu Bo-la and gambling kingpin Lam Pui-chang were gunned down in similar gangland executions.

 Witnesses to yesterday's killings said they heard more than 10 shots.

 Police later recovered shells from Chinese military-issue 7.62mm semi-automatic pistols.

 Police sources believed the killings were a revenge attack in an ongoing triad war over profits from VIP rooms in casinos.

 At 1.15 am on the same street, a motorcycle was set alight as a makeshift firebomb outside the Macau branch of Citibank, a stone's-throw away from the Governor's office. Another motorcycle parked between several cars in the Inner Harbour area was set alight in a similar way, destroying the cars.

 At about the same time as the arson attacks, Macau police were questioning more than 100 people during an anti-triad operation.

 Armed Security Police Tactical Unit officers and Judiciary police detectives launched the operation at about 1 am, checking the identity cards of visitors at several casinos and nightclubs. Similar raids had been conducted over the past two weekends as police tried to put a brake on the vicious triad war.

 Sources said Hong Kong's Organised Crime and Triad Bureau had passed on a list of suspected triad members to the Immigration Department in the hope of preventing them trying to travel to Macau.

 Immigration officers were said to be warning suspected triad members they could be turned away from Macau even if they managed to pass through Hong Kong's immigration, according to sources.

 The use of motorcycles with hitmen riding pillion is routine in Macau's street war and arson attacks are a daily occurrence.

 Hong Kong businessman Lam Pui-chang was gunned down in that way near the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Taipa Island.

 Lam was a shareholder in a franchised-out VIP room, a gambling operation which attracts wealthy clients from Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan.

 In November last year, Macau's chief policeman involved in trying to clean up the triads' influence in the casinos survived an attack by the motorcycle killers.

 Manuel Antonio Apolinario was shot twice in the head.

 No one has yet been arrested in the case.



Three men gunned down in Macau's casino war