Shooting Horses

Some people went to a great extent to place dart guns at Hong Kong’s Happy Valley Racecourse, apparently aimed at the horses. The NYTimes is calling it a mystery; everyone else thinks it’s just another plot by gamblers to make the odds go their way.  

A remote-controlled mechanism with a dozen launching tubes was found buried in the turf at Hong Kong’s most famous horse racing track last week; it was rigged with compressed air to fire tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses at the starting gate. . . .

Police officials refused to discuss the device found at Happy Valley, except to say that it was under investigation. One popular theory is that gamblers installed it in an attempt to fix the outcome of races.

The liquid in the darts was being analyzed at a laboratory to determine whether it was a tranquilizer, poison or something else entirely. A long trench was dug underneath where the starting gate stands during a race, and the footlong launching tubes were placed in the trench and concealed under the locations where each horse would stand at the beginning of a race.

Donald Tsang, who was re-elected Sunday as the chief executive of Hong Kong, said in an interview that he believed gamblers were responsible.