After Hong Kong Island burglary spate, safe with HK$900,000 in gold and cash stolen from Kowloon Tong flat
No arrests yet after haul carried out at 80-year-old’s home in well-heeled neighbourhood
A safe containing cash and gold amounting to about HK$900,000 in total was stolen from an upscale Hong Kong flat on Thursday, the latest in a series of break-ins in the city’s well-heeled neighbourhoods.
Police were called to the seventh-floor flat of Phoenix Court on Broadcast Drive in Kowloon Tong soon after 2.30pm when its 80-year-old occupant – a herbalist who had lived at the flat with his wife for 30 years – got home and found they had been burgled. The couple had left the flat shortly after 8am.
“The security gate and front door were prised open and the man’s bedroom was ransacked,” a police spokesman said. “Initial investigation showed a safe storing gold ornaments and local and foreign currency were stolen from the premises.”
A police source said CCTV footage showed a masked man pushing the safe, on a trolley, from the building. He said officers were checking his escape route, and it seemed the haul was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
No one has been arrested.
It came on the heels of a series of break-ins targeting luxury houses and upscale flats across the harbour on Hong Kong Island last week, which prompted police to launch an anti-burglary operation between Thursday and Saturday.
On the first night of the air-and-land operation, two burglars sneaked into a three-storey house on Repulse Bay Road and escaped with HK$120,000 worth of valuables and cash.
