Two male gamblers were unlawfully imprisoned by a casino loan-sharking gang at an inn on Rua do Guimarães for at least 60 hours, during which both were, respectively, physically attacked and one was forced to pose in his underpants for a video, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Lei Chi Hou said at a special press conference yesterday.
According to Lei, the Judiciary Police received separate calls at noon on Tuesday from the two victims’ friends and family members, saying that the duo from the mainland were falsely imprisoned at an unknown location in Macau due to their gambling debts.
A PJ investigation soon identified and caught, Lei noted, two male members of the gang acting as lookouts in front of a residential building in the Inner Harbour area, where PJ officers rescued the two victims held against their will in two separate bedrooms at the inn and caught four other male gang members.
The six mainland suspects, aged between 30 and 43, are surnamed Zheng, Zheng, Zhao, Wen, Feng and Chen, Lei added.
According to a follow-up PJ investigation, Lei said, the two victims had separately borrowed high-interest loans of HK$50,000 each from the gang in the wee hours of Sunday, adding that after the duo signed an IOU to pay 20 percent “interest” on each gambling win, they were taken by the suspects to a casino on the peninsula, where they gambled all the money away and were later held in the inn.
The investigation showed, Lei said, that during their false imprisonment, one of the victims was forcibly stripped of his clothes and videotaped by the suspects in his underpants in order to raise money from his family members to repay his gambling debts, while the other was slapped and beaten with wooden poles.
Under questioning, the six suspects refused to cooperate with the police, Lei said, adding that the two victims had paid the gang “interest” of HK$50,000 and HK$70,000 respectively before they were falsely imprisoned.
The two Zhengs, Zhao, Wen, Feng and Chen were transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, where they face charges of usury and false imprisonment, as well as causing bodily harm and the illegal recording of video or photographic footage, Lei noted, adding that the Judiciary Police, at the time of the press conference, were still looking for other gang members at large.
3 nabbed for loan-sharking: police
Meanwhile, the Judiciary Police uncovered another loan-sharking case on Wednesday, while patrolling at a casino in Cotai, in which a male gambler borrowed chips worth HK$3 million from three loan sharks earlier that day, with a deal of taking half of his winnings as “interest”.
According to Lei, the loan-sharking trio from the mainland, aged between 38 and 48, are surnamed Wang, Hou and Chen. The middle-aged victim is a non-local resident.
Lei said that the trio had collected “interest” in the form of chips worth about HK$300,000 from the victim during a two-hour-long gambling session.
The Judiciary Police transferred the loan-sharking threesome to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) after yesterday’s press conference, facing charges of usury, Lei noted.
The hooded loan sharks suspected of false imprisonment are taken to the nearby Public Prosecutions Office in a Judiciary Police (PJ) bus from the PJ headquarters in Zape yesterday. – Photo: Yuki Lei
