Gangsters planning to teach Edison Chen a lesson over racy photos

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HONG KONG media reports said gangsters are supposedly planning to teach Edison Chen a lesson or kill him over the celebrity sex-photo scandal.

Chen, 27, is expected to return from the United States to Hong Kong and face the media on Sunday, said Mavis Leung, his spokesman, who declined to elaborate.

Organised crime has long played an important role in Hong Kong's entertainment industry. The current scandal has led Hong Kong tabloids to run reports in the last several days of supposed plans by gangsters to 'teach a lesson' to Chen and perhaps even kill him.

Chen's travel plans have been shrouded in secrecy, but Sudden Weekly said he may fly first to Japan, where he would board a Hong Kong-bound private plane owned by Media Asia studio head Peter Lam.

Mr Lam, who is also the owner of Chen's management company, said it was up to the actor to decide whether to quit showbiz after the scandal.

He described Chen as a 'kid' and urged the public to give him a chance to explain what had happened and let him 'get back on his feet again'.

Sudden Weekly tabloid said the racy photo scandal is said to have started because the actor's businessman father was in debt.

It said that after Chen took his laptop to be serviced in 2006, risque pictures that he allegedly took of women including Twins singer Gillian Chung and actress Cecilia Cheung had been passed around by insiders in the computer industry.

But the photos did not become publicly available until they fell into the hands of his father's creditors and were leaked onto the Net, the report said.

For the others involved in the photo scandal, the fall-out continues.

Cheung's father-in-law, actor Patrick Tse, has denied the latest round of rumours that she has been kicked out of the Tse family.

Chung, who apologised on Monday, will make her first TV appearance since the scandal on a charity show tomorrow. But a Twins concert scheduled for April has been postponed to September.

Meanwhile, the charges against the first man arrested in connection with the scandal was released in court on Friday after the Obscene Articles Tribunal found that the photograph should have been classified as 'indecent' - a lesser offence.

Chung Yik Tin, 29, who was accused of uploading a photograph showing someone resembling Chung, half naked and spreading her legs on a bed, was initially charged and refused bail for publishing an obscene photograph.

Police have arrested nine people in connection with photographs and videos on the Internet over the last two weeks.

Three suspects have been formally charged, including a 24-year-old man in Kowloon who was charged on Tuesday with publishing obscene materials. after he was said to have posted 100 photos.

He did not enter a plea and was freed on bail of HK$10,000.

Some Web users in Hong Kong see the police action as an infringement on individual freedoms. They held a protest last Sunday, arguing, among other things, that Hong Kong's anti-pornography ordinance is too broad and too vague, and that this is a case of unequal treatment.

'On the Internet there are a lot of nude pictures and sexy photos, but the police don't bring charges' except in the current case involving the singers,' said Oiwan Lam, a local blogger who participated in the demonstration and edits inmediahk.net, a citizen-reporter Web site.