I’ve been on Hong Thai tours before, to mainland China and to Thailand. It’s a reputable company that runs decent, affordable tours to many locations in South East Asia. So when I turned on Al Jazeera last night and saw live footage of a Hong Thai bus on the screen, like many Hong Kong people I thought “that easily could have been me.”
A disgruntled ex-policeman, who had lost his job, armed himself with an M-16 assault rifle hijacked a bus carrying 25 people, mostly Hong Kong tourists. A In the end, after a 12-hour stand off with police, eight people were dead.
There’s a lot of anger here, with most of the local media calling the Filipino police incompetent.
There has been extensive, heart breaking coverage on Hong Kong’s cable news stations showing interviews with a victim identified as “Mrs. Leung” who was able to get off the bus alive. Sadly, her husband and two daughters ages 14 and 21 were killed. Her 18-year-old son was in intensive care in Manila.
“The Philippine government … I can’t accept this. Why did they do this to us?” she said.
“[The gunman] did not want to kill us. He only shot us after the negotiations failed,” she said, sobbing.
Leung, who had immigrated to Canada according to HK news agencies, described how she had stayed down in her seat, pretending to be dead. Her husband was already shot, lying on the floor next to her, and she thought about getting up from her seat and dying with him.
But, she said, “I thought about my daughters and if we were both gone, who would take care of them?”
She didn’t know at the time that her daughters had also been hit by bullets.
It’s seriously breaking my heart.
The Hong Kong Economic Journal criticised the Philippine police for not being able to get into the bus even after breaking windows and storming it.
“Their appalling professional standards and the lack of strategic planning made observers both angry and sad. This tragedy could have been avoided,” the paper said.
Both the Manila police commander Leocadio Santiago and President Benigno Aquino admitted mistakes had been made.
“We saw some obvious shortcomings in terms of capability and tactics used, or the procedure employed and we are now going to investigate this,” Santiago said on local television.
“There are a lot of things (that) resulted in a tragedy. Obviously we should be improving,” said Aquino, who took office less than two months ago.
One of the problems he emphasised was the way the crisis played out through the media, with the gunman allowed to speak on radio and watch events live on the bus’s television, giving him insights into police actions.
Here’s the latest from the AP.
