HKU professor charged with murder after wife’s body found in suitcase

A University of Hong Kong (HKU) professor has been charged with murder after police found his wife’s decomposing body in a suitcase in his office.

Cheung Kie-chung — an associate professor at the university’s department of mechanical engineering — is expected to appear at Eastern Magistrates’ Court today, Apple Daily reports.

Police suspect that Cheung murdered his wife Tina Chan at their residence in the university’s Wei Lun Hall in the early hours of August 17 after she berated him for not supporting her during an argument with her 28-year-old daughter the previous day.

The argument was over toilet hygiene.

The newspaper reported that, after the dispute, the daughter left the family’s house to spend the night at a friend’s home, and received a text message from her mom at around midnight.

Also at the family’s residence was the couple’s 26-year-old son and Chan’s younger sister who was visiting the family from the UK.

Cheung filed a missing persons report for his wife last week, but police got suspicious after seeing CCTV footage of Cheung moving a large wooden box from Wei Lun Hall to his office in the Haking Wong Building in the university’s Pok Fu Lam campus, just two days after filing the missing persons report.

According to Apple Daily, initial investigations found that a suitcase from the family’s home had gone missing.

Cheung also had purchased 12 wooden boards, six of which had already been assembled into a box, and the other six he was planning on putting together at a workshop in the Haking Wong building.

When asked by officers what the wooden box was for, he told police he was using it to transport something, but that he had already dismantled it.

He was arrested in his office on Tuesday after police conducted a surprise raid on his office on campus and found the wooden box, the suitcase, and the other six wooden boards that would have been used to make the second box.