Dicky Sze Ho-chun

A computer technician will be jailed for stealing sexually explicit photos of Canto pop icon Edison Chen Koon-hei that were distributed on the Internet.

A Hong Kong court yesterday found Dicky Sze Ho-chun, 24, guilty on three counts of obtaining access to a computer with a view to making a dishonest gain. The images showed Chen engaged in lewd sex acts with a string of female celebrities, including Cecilia Cheung and Gillian Chung.

The scandal destroyed Chen's entertainment career in Hong Kong, forcing him to take early retirement from the local industry.

Chief Magistrate Tong Man told Sze that a jail sentence was inevitable due to the seriousness of the crime.

"You breached the trust of your employer," he said. "You took advantage of your position as an employee to steal the data from Chen's computer."

Chen's laptop was taken to Elite Multimedia Ltd for repair in the summer of 2006.

Sze's colleague, Chris Tse Lap-kiu, discovered the images and saved the data to an external hard disk to use as back up during repairs. Sze later copied the images to another computer server connected to the Internet.

He showed the images to two female staff at a household store and gave one a compact disc with 1,300 photos.

The images were widely circulated on the Internet last year. The court was told that Sze knew it was wrong to access computer data without the customer's consent.

Defense counsel Kevin Tang pleaded for leniency, saying Sze was just 21 when he committed the crime and was ignorant of the law.

Magistrate Tong remanded Sze in custody for sentence on May 13 but ruled out a community service order. The court is waiting for a pre-sentence report on Sze, who does not have a criminal record.

Sze appeared calm when the judgment was handed down yesterday. Outside the court, Sze's mother said the family could not afford to appeal and begged for a lenient sentence.

"How can we appeal? We have no money," she said.

Solicitor Vitus Leung Wing-hang said the offence carried a maximum three-year prison term. He believed Sze would be sentenced to a maximum six months in a detention center.

(China Daily, April 30, 2009)