Interesting news from the Hong Kong horse racing world.
From The Independent:
Racing: Hong Kong rocked by discovery of poison dartsAnd I bet that they will bust some minor character but the real people involved will never be found.
Hong Kong triads, or organised-crime gangs, are believed to be behind a sinister and elaborate poison-dart device embedded in the turf near the starting point for races at the Happy Valley racecourse.
During a routine examination of the track an inspector came across the poison dart shooter, which had 12 metal tubes, each around a foot long, filled with darts buried in the grass under the spot where the starting stalls would be placed for the three races over 1,200 metres (six furlongs) on Wednesday night's card, the Hong Kong Jockey Club said in a statement.
Happy Valley and Sha Tin are Hong Kong's two tracks. Turnover on a single day's racing in Hong Kong can outstrip the income many European or American courses generate in a whole year. A single race here can take in nearly �20m and the gambling-mad people of Hong Kong spend �5.4bn a year on the racing.
The bizarre device could have harmed one, a few or all of the horses in the stalls. The tubes were wired together and linked to a wireless receiver, and spaced in a way that each tube would aim upwards at the horse standing overhead.
"The full nature of the device and its intended purpose has not been established. However, no explosives were found," the Jockey Club statement ran.
A senior police source told local media that he believed the plan was to fire some kind of tranquilliser upwards to where the starting stall was. "I doubt very much that it was meant to do anything more than just slightly tranquillise the horse. That's my speculation," the source said.
It is fairly obvious that the poison-dart shooter was related to gambling and most likely linked to the triads, said the police source.
"It could well be that triads are part of that, especially the gambling which is done outside the Jockey Club's system. If you can get the horse to slow down just enough, it looks like a normal race and the favourite may not come in."
