A 56-year-old construction worker was arrested for allegedly splashing warm liquid onto the lower back and buttocks of at least 10 women in Hong Kong’s streets over the past month.
The man was caught in a police operation on Great George Street in the Causeway Bay shopping district on the night of Feb 23, Hong Kong police were reported as saying by the South China Morning Post.
An officer had spotted him splashing an unknown liquid onto the buttocks of a 17-year-old girl, the police added.
Initial investigations showed that the suspect had carried the liquid around in a vacuum flask and poured the liquid onto his palm before he quickly approached his victim from behind.
He was arrested at the scene for outraging public decency, and his clothes and the vacuum flask were seized for inspection, the police said. Those convicted of outraging public decency in Hong Kong could be jailed for up to seven years.
Victims described the liquid as “odourless, but with a light colour and slightly warm”, police said, adding that they were waiting for test results to identify it.
Police said the man was suspected to be a serial offender.
Between Jan 20 and Feb 18, the police received reports of similar attacks from nine women, aged 16 to 32, who had been walking near the Mong Kok subway station when they were assaulted. Mong Kok is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
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By the time the women realised their clothes had been soiled, the perpetrator had fled, police said.
Some victims reported being attacked twice in an hour.
The police said they had identified the suspect before conducting the operation in Causeway Bay by combing through security footage.
They have also urged victims and eyewitnesses to come forward after noticing a number of social media users posting about similar attacks online.
An Instagram page created in February by a woman claiming to be a victim of such an assault has since shared similar stories from at least 116 people to raise awareness. The page has more than 2,000 followers.
In these posts, the Instagram user details the date and location of each attack, the victim’s gender, as well as a description of what happened. One of these incidents dates back as far as 2004, according to the page.
One woman said she was on a subway train in Wan Chai district in September 2023 when she felt a liquid on her leg after a man in a suit yelled next to her ear and ran off.
“I was very upset and screamed, but nobody helped me,” said the woman.
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Another woman said a topless man suddenly sprayed an unknown liquid at her leg using a bottle when he walked past her in Kowloon’s Jordan district in June 2022.
Shell-shocked, she just stood there as the man walked away, the woman recalled.
The Instagram page that posted their stories called such attacks “sexual violence”. The Instagram user even created a “Crime Hotspots Map” using Google Maps to document the locations of these incidents.
About 80 locations are pinned on the map and more than 50 of them are in Kowloon, where Mong Kok is located.
According to Chinese-language news site World Journal, the Instagrammer was in Wan Chai in July 2023 when a person splashed a liquid on her buttocks. She noticed some women posting about similar incidents on Instagram in February and decided to create a map to bring attention to this issue.
She told World Journal that most of the victims did not know who the perpetrators were.
This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.