A Hong Kong court has sentenced a man to six months in prison for making false bomb threats in May to frame his girlfriend’s Taiwanese ex-boyfriend and attempting to pervert the course of justice after his arrest.
Zhang Kejia, 35, pleaded guilty at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday to three counts of making bomb hoaxes and another charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice, according to local media.
The self-employed man admitted to having dialled 999 on May 13 three times, each time playing the same voice recording, saying that bombs had been planted at Kai Tak Stadium, where Taiwanese band Mayday was set to perform that night.
The man also mentioned “Taiwan independence” and “Hong Kong independence” when he called the police. Officers did not find any explosive devices at the stadium, and Mayday’s concert eventually took place as scheduled.
After Zhang was arrested in June, he told police that he was impersonating his girlfriend’s ex-lover when he made the bomb hoaxes, in an attempt to place blame on the Taiwanese man, who Zhang said had been harassing her in recent years.
When he was remanded in custody, Zhang instructed his girlfriend and two visitors to reach out to “relevant people” in the mainland Chinese authorities, in a bid to pressure the Hong Kong judiciary to drop the prosecution or to seek a lesser charge.
His lawyer, Senior Counsel Hector Pun, told the court on Wednesday that Zhang had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing his mother’s death in a traffic accident when he was 16.
Zhang had been troubled by the guilt of not being able to save his mother, Pun said, and the traumatic event had led him to adopt an “extreme measure” in the hope of protecting his girlfriend from the harassment of her ex-boyfriend.
The Taiwanese man had threatened Zhang’s girlfriend with her intimate images, and Zhang had paid him HK$4 million, but did not stop the harassment, leading to the offence, the lawyer added.
Regarding Zhang’s attempt to pressure the judiciary, Pun said his client had been reckless while in custody and that he had realised the gravity of his mistake.
Zhang studied at a “top-tier high school” in mainland China and came to Hong Kong for a university degree in quantitative finance in 2009, according to the lawyer. He became a city resident in 2016.
He is married with two children but has become estranged from his wife. He has a baby with his girlfriend.
The defence lawyer also submitted multiple letters in mitigation for Zhang, including one penned by an unnamed ex-lawmaker, whom Pun said was a Hong Kong delegate to the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature.
Acting Principal Magistrate Andy Cheng said the man acted deliberately and destroyed evidence afterwards, reflecting the planned nature of the offence.
The bomb hoaxes led the police to deploy multiple officers to Kai Tak Stadium, which can accommodate 50,000 people, Cheng added.
The magistrate sentenced Zhang to five months in prison for the bomb hoax charges and two months for perverting the course of justice, calling the defendant “delusional” for thinking he could pressure the judiciary.
But Cheng ordered part of the sentences to be carried out concurrently and set the total jail term at six months.
Prosecutors dropped a bomb hoax charge against Zhang over a separate threat he made about having planted bombs at a central government office in Hong Kong, without specifying the exact location.
