'King Of Robbery' Died Of Natural Causes: Inquest

A coroner’s inquest on Thursday found that the notorious “King of Robbery”, Yip Kai-foon, died of natural causes when he passed away in prison last year aged 55.

A jury unanimously found that Yip’s cause of death was lung cancer, which had also spread to his brain.

The jurors recommended that prisoners be allowed to seek traditional Chinese medicine treatment in future. Yip had asked for this, but his request was turned down by prison bosses.

Yip masterminded a series of armed raids on jewellery shops in the 1980s, and was given a 36 year-jail term for kidnapping, possessing firearms and escaping from custody.

Yip, who was born in Haifeng in Guangdong province, started his cross-border raids in the mid 1980s, leading a gang armed with AK47s which targeted jewellery shops across Kowloon. They fired at will and got away with stones worth millions of dollars.

But Yip was caught in a police sting operation in 1984 and was later sentenced to 18 years in prison.

But he escaped from Queen Mary Hospital in 1989, where he had been taken after pretending to have a stomach ache. Then he continued to make forays into Hong Kong with his armed gang to rob jewellery stores.

Yip was finally caught in 1996 after a gun battle with police in the Kennedy Town area. He was hit in the spine and left paralysed from the waist down, spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.