Hong Kong police probe insect-fight gambling ring

HONG KONG (AFP) - Hong Kong's obsession with gambling reached unusual extremes with the arrest of 115 people for betting on insect fights, police said.

The city is well known as a haven for China's horse racing and soccer gamblers, but raids on a club in the seedy Mongkok district of Kowloon broke a betting syndicate gambled on battles between huge crickets.

Senior Inspector Angus Yeung Fu-yin of the Special Duties Squad in Mongkok said the cricket fights, the first officers have uncovered in five years, amazed even police.

"Gambling of this type is very rare here although it was very popular in the old days, so we were very surprised when we first heard about it," Yeung said, adding that illegal gambling on dogfights and bird fights is common.

"Only older people continue to do it," he said.

The gamblers, aged from 30 to 80, were arrested in the midst of what was billed as a championship between insects from Hong Kong, nearby Macau and Guangzhou in neighbouring China.

Police said the men were not thought to have links with organised criminals, called triads here.

Officers seized nearly 200 crickets, 8,000 Hong Kong dollars (1,026 US dollars) and gambling paraphernalia, including small baskets that were used to house the insects and bamboo sticks used to agitate them.

Cricket fighting can be traced back to the Tang dynasty of 618-907 and had long been confined to aristocrats, senior officials and wealthy merchants. Winning brought honour while losing meant shame, according to the South China Morning Post.

Traders of the battling insects hunt out the fiercest crickets and devote many hours training them, the Post said. A champion cricket can cost up to 20,000 yuan (2,600 US dollars) each, it said.

While the prize money for cricket-fighting rarely exceeds a couple of thousand dollars, winners of fights between dogs can scoop up to a million dollars, according to the Chinese-language Sun newspaper.