Just after midnight on November 23rd, the landlady of a building in an older district of Hong Kong checked on one of her tenants, a prostitute. The sheets were bloody and the woman was dead, apparently strangled. The murder was similar to four killings that occurred in March-three in the New Territories on the mainland, one on Hong Kong island. The investigation that followed quickly led to the arrest of one man accused of the first three killings and another for the fourth, deemed to be a copycat crime.rnThe latest death has prompted police to raid prostitutes' haunts and scrutinise footage from Hong Kong's ubiquitous video cameras. Critical clues in the March killings were said to include video images and the use of an electronic pass for the city's metro that allowed police to trace a suspect's movements. But as effective as the Hong Kong police may be in capturing criminals, the murders have raised a wider question: rather than protecting prostitutes, are Hong Kong's laws contributing to their deaths?
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