Her’s was a sad story. Gastric cancer, she said, maybe just a few days to live. Husband? Gone. Children? Motherless, back in the mainland.
All she needed, she told passersby from the ground outside Sham Shui Po MTR station, was a just little bit of money to see her family one last time.
Time was short, it appeared. She was, after all, vomiting blood.
Or was she?
The woman — according to an on.cc report — was seen by a witness using DIY techniques to achieve the blood effect, throwing her sob story rather deeply into question.
“The woman came out of nowhere and laid on the ground. After talking to a man, she took some cash from her pocket and put it into the container near her,” recalled the witness.
“She was chewing something in her mouth, and all of a sudden, she vomited some blood. I watched the whole scene. Everything was staged.”
To be fair, the woman does lead a pretty hardscrabble life, according to the outlet, though one notably less dramatic than her begging narrative.
She appears to be a drug user living at a nearby homeless encampment.
It reported that after about 15 minutes of panhandling, she stood up, smoked a cigarette and changed her clothes in a public toilet.
A reporter then witnessed her allegedly buying drugs in nearby Tung Chau Street Park with the money received from begging.
He then followed her to the homeless encampment under a bridge near Tung Chau Street Temporary Market and then on to a nearby Methadone Clinic.
Though often visible, begging is technically illegal in Hong Kong under the 1977 Summary Offenses Ordinance (Cap 228 s 26A), which sets penalties of up to 12 months in prison for repeat offenders.
Police have periodically cracked down on the practice, and between 2011 and 2015 arrested 411 mainlanders for begging in Hong Kong.
Sham Shui Po district councillor Scott Leung Man-kwong said panhandling in the area was a problem.
“The environment is so bad that it not only affects the citizens but also the business of the Jade Market nearby,” he said.
He called on the government to help homeless people in the nearby encampment to find appropriate shelter.
The spokesman from the FEHD said that they would follow up the case and look for a long-term solution dealing with the problems in the area.
