Rebel City. South China Morning Post Team
post before leaving for Taiwan that Chan had said she was his “first and last girlfriend.”
To her homemaker mother she had been more guarded, waiting until the day of her flight to mention that she was going on holiday with a friend, and even then not sharing the identity of her traveling companion.
She did, however, send a WhatsApp message to her mother in the early hours of February 17 to say she would be returning to Hong Kong that night.
But Poon never returned.
As the days went by her parents became increasingly distraught, eventually deciding to search their daughter’s flat. They found copies of Chan’s arrival and departure cards from the trip and these revealed the name of the hotel in Taipei’s Datong district where the couple had stayed.
On March 5, Poon’s mother filed a missing persons report. Then her husband headed for Taipei to search for his daughter and help Taiwanese police in their investigations.
It was not long before they found a smoking gun. Surveillance footage showed Poon and Chan entering the Purple Garden Hotel on February 16, the night before their flight, but there was no footage of Poon ever leaving. There were only images of Chan checking out the next day, dragging a heavy, pink suitcase.
Confession time
Tipped off by investigators in Taipei, Hong Kong police questioned Chan on March 13. Under caution, the teenager said that on their last night in Taipei, he and Poon had quarreled over how to pack the new pink suitcase they had bought at a night market earlier that evening.
They made up and made love, he said, but began arguing again in the early hours of the next morning when Poon blurted out that the father of her baby was her ex-boyfriend. Chan said Poon had then shown him a video of her having sex with another man, and he flew into a jealous rage.
He smashed Poon’s head against the wall and, when she fell to the floor, strangled her with both hands, struggling with her writhing body for several minutes until she fell still. He then stuffed her corpse into the suitcase they had bought together and went to bed.
At 7am, he got rid of Poon’s belongings by leaving them at various rubbish collection points near the hotel. He then wheeled her body out of the hotel in the suitcase and caught a train, traveling 15 stations before dumping the corpse in a thicket at a park near Zhuwei station.
He threw away the empty suitcase but kept Poon’s iPhone 6, her Casio digital camera and HSBC cash card. He then used the card to withdraw NT$20,000 (HK$5,160) and went shopping for clothes before catching the 11.22pm flight back to Hong Kong. Over the next two days, he used Poon’s ATM card to withdraw a further HK$19,200 (US$2,470) to pay his credit card bills.
The details of the case seemed clear and, with Chan having confessed, Hong Kong police formally arrested him. Taiwanese police found Poon’s decomposing body later that day, exactly where Chan said it would be.
A crisis unfolds
When news first spread of the young woman’s gruesome death, nobody could have imagined the case would spark the biggest political crisis to have faced Hong Kong since the city returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
The problem was that while Chan had admitted killing Poon, he could not be tried in Hong Kong for an offense committed in another jurisdiction. Nor could he be sent against his will to Taipei as the two cities lacked an extradition agreement.
Instead, the best Hong Kong could do was charge Chan on theft and money-laundering offenses related to the use of Poon’s credit card, an outcome that would be hard to disguise as anything but a travesty of justice. In Hong Kong, murder carries a mandatory life sentence, while the maximum punishment for money laundering is 14 years in prison and a HK$5 million fine. What’s more, given the relatively small sums involved, it was likely that even if he was found guilty, Chan would receive a substantially lighter sentence and could be freed within just a year.
It was against this backdrop, with Poon’s parents repeatedly appealing for their daughter’s killer to be brought to justice and the Taiwanese authorities eager to pursue him, that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor proposed changing the law so that Hong Kong could extradite fugitives on a case-by-case basis to those jurisdictions it did not have agreements with.
It had been a year since Poon’s death when Lam introduced her extradition bill in February 2019 and Chan was in remand, still awaiting trial. Lam said the bill had been inspired by Chan’s case and the need to close the loophole that was preventing him facing trial for murder.
Immediately, there were backers for the bill, with the pro-Beijing political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, holding a press conference on the day of its introduction to give its seal of approval. Poon’s mother was among those who spoke at the event. She said she and her husband could still not accept the fact that her daughter was gone or that, one year on, her killer had not been brought to justice.
“The cruel scenes of how the murderer had carried her body around in a suitcase, dumped it in bushes and allowed the stray dogs to eat it keep creeping into my mind. It breaks my heart,” she said, weeping. “The only thing we can do for our daughter is to make sure justice is served.”
Given the grief-stricken backdrop, Lam might have thought passing such a bill would be relatively straightforward. It needed to be done before Chan was out of prison and could in theory flee the city.
But from the beginning there were persistent criticisms from a public that would not be easily silenced. Opponents said the bill, supposedly created to fix a legal loophole, would create even bigger loopholes of its own. Not only would it pave the way for extraditions to Taiwan, it would also – far more controversially – open the floodgates to extraditions to mainland China, something many people suggested had been Lam’s real motivation all along as an attempt to ingratiate herself with her political masters in Beijing.
Even more damaging was that many critics – some of the top legal minds in the land among them – felt that the bill represented an erosion of the “one country, two systems” arrangement under which Hong Kong was governed and which provided the foundation of its independent judiciary.
Whether the criticism was fair or not, an increasing number of Hongkongers believed the bill threatened their way of life and they were not willing to go down without a fight.
With Lam sticking to her guns, the ranks of the dissenters began to swell, their anger gathering steam and finally erupting into largescale marches and demonstrations from June 2019. Eventually, Lam relented and formally withdrew the bill in September, but by then it was too late.
The protests had already morphed into an increasingly violent anti-government, anti-Beijing movement, with demands for greater democracy and police accountability. Masked radicals blocked roads, started fires and hurled petrol bombs at police. They smashed up MTR stations and any businesses they deemed as linked to Beijing. Thousands were arrested, with hundreds facing the charge of rioting, which carries a jail term of 10 years.
Freedom for some
While Hongkongers were growing increasingly concerned about losing their freedoms, Chan was about to regain his. As the opposition to Lam was mounting, he pleaded guilty to the money-laundering charges and on April 29, 2019, was jailed for 29 months. The sentence was backdated to the time of his arrest, and with good behavior, he would be eligible for release that year.
On October 23, 2019, Chan emerged from the maximum-security Pik Uk Correctional Institution in Clear Water Bay to face a Hong Kong in turmoil.
It had been a month since Lam had withdrawn the bill supposedly inspired by his crime, yet the chaos it had unleashed was still in full swing.
Chan bowed before the media crowd waiting for him. He apologized to Poon’s family and the people of Hong Kong, saying: “I am willing, for my impulsive act and the things I did wrong, to surrender myself to Taiwan to face