A 48-year-old married senior Customs officer was acquitted of indecently assaulting a female colleague after a magistrate accepted that he had lightly patted her back to comfort her. Tong Kin Chung was also cleared of an alternative common assault charge at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on 10 September 2026.
The case concerned an alleged incident on 3 December 2025 in a restricted room on the first floor of the Hong Kong Customs outbound cargo inspection building at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge Hong Kong Port in Chek Lap Kok.
The prosecution alleged that Tong touched colleague X on the right side of her waist and her right buttock. The defence said he had noticed that she looked tired and tapped the middle of her back once as an act of comfort.
Magistrate Wong Siu Cheung said X’s evidence had not been shaken during cross-examination, but expressed doubts about her description of the surroundings. The magistrate also questioned whether Tong would have committed the alleged act in a staff rest area where other people were present, given that he had known X for a long time and knew that her husband was a Customs senior superintendent.
The court rejected X’s account of Tong using suggestive language. Wong said that description did not fit the assessment of Tong given by a defence character witness, his supervisor, and noted that if the remarks had been made, they would probably have been loud enough for someone else to hear. No witness said they had heard them.
Wong accepted Tong’s account that he approached X after seeing that she looked tired and lightly patted her back to reassure her. The magistrate regarded such a gesture as ordinary social behaviour and found him not guilty of indecent assault. The alternative common assault charge also failed.