Reward raised to $1m for info on eye girl who fled to Taiwan

The reward for identifying the woman who sustained an eye injury during the unrest in 2019 has been boosted to HK$1 million.

The woman, identified only as "K" in court, sustained the injury at a protest scene outside Tsim Sha Tsui police station on August 11, 2019. K reportedly left for Taiwan last year.

The 803.com website founded by former chief executive Leung Chun-ying has increased the bounty for identifying her to HK$1 million from HK$400,000.

On Facebook, Leung said the increase comes as more information has become available regarding her whereabouts.

The website was established to offer cash rewards for those who help to identify protesters during the unrest in order to prosecute them.

Those who offered tips which help in the arrests of protesters and eventually bring them to court will receive the reward.

Meanwhile, the medical report released by the Hospital Authority on K states that her eyeball was not ruptured after it was hit by a hard object, police sources said.

Police are continuing their probe into K's connection to the riots and whether her injury was used to incite hatred, they added.

The New York Times sensationally splashed with her picture three months after she injured her eye.

The picture was extracted from a news feature published on November 23, 2019 entitled Hong Kong: A City Divided, which included 34 faces from the anti-fugitive bill movement and a sentence illustrating their feeling toward the protests.

Among the photos were that of activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung.

The photo of K, taken in a studio, quoted her saying: "Only in a totalitarian, distorted society would people be forced to defend it with life and blood," and identified her as a "volunteer medic struck in the eye."

K was the name given in court when she challenged the police in a judicial review on November 17, 2019 to obtain her medical report from the Hospital Authority.

Sources said she did not tell anyone that her eyeball was ruptured and that the "girl with a ruptured eye" was just what the public called her rather than what she called herself.

It was factually correct to call her merely a volunteer medic struck in the eye, which was later adopted by the New York Times.

There were local media which cited sources that countered the police version, saying that K's eye had been badly damaged.

A local newspaper yesterday quoted sources as saying that doctors at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital diagnosed K to have her right eye ruptured, adding that there were also bone fractures all around that eye due to the impact.

Yeung Tsz-chun, a liberal studies teacher at Diocesan Girls' School, who only has 5 percent eyesight in his right eye after being hit by a suspected rubber bullet, said it is inappropriate to judge whether her eyesight is normal simply by judging her appearance.