● More than 150 demonstrators marched on immigration control offices at London Heathrow airport, protesting against virginity tests carried out on Asian women entering Britain. The tests were aimed at checking the bona fides of unmarried women arriving in the country to join their fiancés. The government stopped the procedures after public outcry in Britain and India.

● Three men stole jewels worth HK$3 million while chatting to and distracting a salesman at an international jewellery fair in Munich. Police said one of them vanished with a suitcase full of jewels while his two accomplices engaged the German salesman in conversation.

February 13, 1979

● Harpers International was to help set up a vehicle assembly plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, making it the first foreign motor group to have such an arrangement with China. Harpers would supply the design and technical know-how to set up the plant, and China would build it and provide the management and workers.

February 14, 1979

● Police raided a coffee shop near Kuala Lumpur airport and arrested at least 20 airline staff suspected of being ringleaders in industrial action which had led to the total suspension of Malaysia Airline System (MAS) flights. The arrests by the capital’s special branch and anti-riot squad followed a government announcement that it had indefinitely suspended all MAS domestic and international flights because it suspected aircraft had been tampered with.

● Electrification of the Kowloon-Canton Railway was expected to cost substantially more than the original HK$400 million estimate. One source close to the project’s consultants claimed the final bill would be more than double the original estimate.

● Runaway multimillionaire newspaper publisher Ma Sik-chun and his nephew Ma Woon-yin admitted at Taipei District Court that they had entered Taiwan the year before with falsified documents. It was the first hearing for the two since they were indicted for forging Taiwanese entry permits on arrival a month earlier. The pair fled to Taiwan in September 1978 while on bail pending trial on drug charges in Hong Kong.

February 15, 1979

● A British businessman won a battle to sell his home-made wine as Chateau Piddle. Peter Dodgson wanted to use the name in honour of his home village of North Piddle, in western England. Although he would not be allowed an official entry in the register of trade names, Dodgson could market the product under the name of his choice.

February 16, 1979

● A number of Western countries including the US agreed “on paper” to use a remote, uninhabited island in the South China Sea as a temporary transit camp for Vietnamese refugees, the chief of Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency, General Yoga Sugama, revealed. The general did not name the island but there was widespread speculation that Indonesia would offer one of the Natuna islands.

● The Vietnamese government was “profiteering appallingly” from refugees, said Lord Goronwy-Roberts, a minister at the British Foreign Office. Speaking in the House of Lords, he cited reports that refugees were paying large sums in gold to their government before leaving for countries that did not want to take them.

February 17, 1979

● Dutch police arrested six Hong Kong men believed to have been involved in an international drugs syndicate which had been a major supplier of heroin to Canada. The arrests and subsequent seizure of 6kg of heroin, worth about HK$550,000 on the open market, was the climax of an operation covering seven countries from North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe.

Remember A Day looks at significant news and events reported by the Post during this week in history