Photos purportedly showing a Hong Kong actor partially nude with
several starlets were copied from his computer when it was serviced
last year and later distributed over the Internet, police said
Monday.
The photographs, allegedly of actor and singer Edison Chen in
bed with singer Gillian Chung along with suggestive images of
actress Cecilia Cheung, were recently posted online, sparking a
media frenzy.
While Chung's company, Emperor Entertainment Group, initially
said the photographs of the normally squeaky-clean star was a
digital fake, Hong Kong police said some 1,300 private shots of
celebrities had been stolen from a faulty personal computer
belonging to an individual who took it to a computer shop for
servicing.
"A person had taken his computer to be fixed, but during the
maintenance period, someone used dishonest means to take some
information from the computer and distributed this information
indiscriminately to others," assistant police commissioner Wong
Fook-chuen said.
While the police gave no specific names, Hong Kong's Ming
Pao newspaper reported the photographs belonged to Edison
Chen, 27.
"A person in the shop found hidden inside (Chen's) computer,
confidential nude pictures of naked female stars which were then
secretly copied," Ming Pao reported, quoting an anonymous
source.
The computer shop was subsequently raided by police officers in
a widening investigation across the special administrative region
which has led to eight arrests for infringing obscene material laws
and the seizure of over 1,000 explicit images including those of
six women, four of whom were public figures, the police said.
In a statement on his blog over the weekend, Chen criticized
some of the recent media coverage and widespread publishing of the
images.
"I would like for?you to respect the situation that
everyone is in and report the truth to the fullest," he wrote.
He didn't clarify whether the images had been faked or stolen,
but his manager said Chen would cooperate with the police
investigation.
Hong Kong's police commissioner, Tang King-shing, said the case
was being treated seriously and warned the possession and
distribution of such images might be illegal.
(Shanghai Daily February 5, 2008)
