Human remains at British embassy in Beijing and nibbling rat costs factory millions: headlines from 40 years ago
- A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
A rat costing a petrochemical factory millions of dollars in lost production, a neo-Nazi group sending a letter bomb to a member of the British parliament and human skeletons being dug up at the British embassy in Beijing made the headlines 40 years ago this week.
October 26, 1980
● An increasing number of Hong Kong fishermen were netting vast profits by smuggling luxury goods into villages and ports along China’s coast. More than HK$1 billion worth of silver coins, many buried in China since 1949, had flowed into the city as a result of the growing smuggling trade.
October 27, 1980
● A dozen convicted Irish Republican Army terrorists started a mass hunger strike “to the death if necessary.” The “dirty dozen”, serving sentences in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, were fighting for political prisoner status. They were chosen by a group of 350 IRA men who had waged a bizarre four-and-a-half years protest campaign in the Maze’s H-shaped cell blocks to be recognised as prisoners of war in Ireland’s political and sectarian conflict.
