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| A District Court judge said the 5 had conspired in trying to pick the wallet of a Korean woman |
Five Filipino tourists convicted of trying to steal the
purse of a Korean woman inside the Central MTR
station over a year ago, were each sentenced to two years in jail on May 14.
But District Court Judge David Dufton said the convicts – Zenaida
Aviles, Rasim Linambos, Arlene Gerodias, Manuelito Camacho and Delia Tagalo –
may serve just a few months, as they had already been detained for 13 months.
Their sentences could be cut further for good behavior in jail.
According to the prosecution, the five knew each other and
tried to carry out the theft together. An undercover police officer who saw
them going up and down the Wanchai MTR station escalators tailed them and
alerted nine other officers.
On arrival in Central, the officer saw the five sandwich a Korean
couple down the escalator to the Tsuen Wan-bound trains. Aviles
That was when the officer called in his colleagues, but the
defendants scattered and boarded the departing train. They were arrested when
they tried to get off in Admiralty.
Dufton rejected the defendants’ claim that they were not
acting together to steal, and that none of them had tried to steal the wallet
from Ko’s backpack.
He brushed aside their claim that from their guesthouse in Jordan they had set out to go to World-Wide Plaza
Dufton said that in coming up with his verdict he carefully
considered all the evidence, including the oral and written submissions of
prosecutor Bina Sujanani and defense lawyers Andrew Raffell, John Marray, James
Sherry, Paul Stephenson and Maurice Peter Tracy.
Dufton said he had considered the defendants’ mitigations, including
Aviles having three little children and coming here to buy clothes for resale
back home; Linambos having gone to Macau to visit his girlfriend and coming to
Hong Kong to look for a placement agency that offered a job in Canada, and
Gerodias coming here to buy Disney clothes that she could resell in the
Philippines.
Dufton said he used similar cases of pickpocketing that
involved conspiracy and international element to come up with a 24-month
sentence for each of the five.
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