British man charged with murder of housekeeper found floating under waterfall in Hong Kong

Suspect, 34, arrested on return to island from mainland China over death of 25-year-old Indonesian woman

A British businessman has been charged with murder in Hong Kong after an Indonesian housekeeper was found dead at the bottom of a waterfall.
The 34-year-old, who has not been named, was arrested with his wife at a train station on Tuesday as they returned from mainland China.
According to police, he went to Waterfall Bay Park in Pok Fu Lam with the victim late on Sunday evening, but was seen 40 minutes later getting into a taxi alone.
He then immediately left Hong Kong, police said.
The victim, a 25-year-old woman, was seen floating beneath the waterfall at about 7am on Monday, where she was pronounced dead at the scene.
She is believed to have drowned after being hit with a hard object, according to local reports.
Police said that an initial post-mortem examination revealed the cause of death to be “asphyxiation by drowning” and that head injuries were also detected.
Sin Kwok-ming, the police superintendent, told reporters: “The evidence did not appear to suggest a natural death.”
The suspect and victim knew each other but the housekeeper was not employed by the Briton, police said.
Supt Sin added: “We found so many unreasonable things related to the arrested man. He didn’t report to the police and immediately left Hong Kong after the incident. Some evidence related to him had disappeared too.”
The suspect’s wife, a 36-year-old from Hong Kong, was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender but was later released on bail. She is required to report back to police in November.
Local media said the pair settled in Hong Kong after getting married, where they started a small business together.
Pictures taken on Tuesday showed the man handcuffed and wearing a hood covering his face as police escorted him around the crime scene for a video reconstruction.
The suspect, who holds a Hong Kong ID card, is due in court on Friday.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are aware of a British national arrested in Hong Kong and are in contact with local authorities.”
There are more than 350,000 migrant workers in Hong Kong, with many coming from Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines.
The Asian Migrants Coordinating Body, an advocacy group, expressed its “deepest sorrow and anger” over the case on Wednesday.
In 2016, British banker Rurik Jutting was given two consecutive life sentences after being found guilty of torturing and murdering two Indonesian women in Hong Kong.
The case gripped the world’s media owing to the brutality of the killings and the graphic footage shown to jurors during the trial.