When a ‘spurned lover’ bombed a Hong Kong hotel in ‘bizarre’ attempt to murder his love rival

For Kenneth Lam Man-tat, assistant lobby manager at Tsim Sha Tsui’s Holiday Inn Golden Mile Hotel, February 13, 1991 began like any other day. But then he received what he believed to be an early Valentine’s Day gift from his new wife.

The package exploded as he opened it.

“There were holes in his head that we couldn’t stop bleeding,” Nick Masters, a British tourist passing through the hotel lobby at the time of the blast, was quoted as saying in a South China Morning Post report the next day. “He looked as if he had taken the full force, his face was a complete mess, black and it looked like he had lost an eye. He was in such pain he was unable to scream.”

Police arrested 37-year-old Raymond Ng Kin-ming the evening of the blast after receiving a tip from a private investigator once hired by the suspect “to trace the activities of the victim”.

During Ng’s trial, in 1994, the High Court heard how the “spurned lover bombed the Holiday Inn Golden Mile in a bizarre attempt to murder his love rival”.

Years earlier, Ng had been in a relation­ship with Lam’s wife, Anna Cheng Mei-sim. “Cheng had separated from him in 1988 because she thought he was seeing some­one else,” reported the Post on April 13. “When she refused to go back to him, Ng became totally obsessed.”

Searching Ng’s flat, police discovered a briefcase “stuffed with ‘souvenirs’ includ­ing a used condom, underwear and the sheet on which they had first made love”.