Tomb raiders target Hong Kong tycoon

HONG KONG, China (Reuters) -- Two mainland Chinese brothers told a Hong Kong court they tried to plunder the grave of the late wife of Asia's richest man, Li Ka-shing, in a failed bid to blackmail him for her bones, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The brothers, surnamed Lau, told Hong Kong's High Court that they had hatched the plan with six others, the Ming Pao newspaper reported.

A spokesperson for the judiciary said the two mainlanders faced several charges, including blackmail and criminal damage to a tomb.

The attempted grave robbery took place around midnight on January 29 last year at a Buddhist cemetery on Hong Kong island. The men had begun digging the grave when a cemetery caretaker and his wife discovered them, the paper added.

The gang attacked the two with meat cleavers, robbing them of their mobile phones and raiding their office of HK$50,000 ($6,400), the court heard. The gang then fled.

The grave of his late wife, Chong Yuet-ming, who died in 1990, was later found prised open with two boxes of digging tools lying nearby, the newspaper said. The bones had not been disturbed.

Li has a fortune estimated by Forbes at $18.8 billion, which would make him the 10th richest man in the world and the wealthiest living in Asia.

Li's son, Victor Li, was kidnapped in 1996 and released after a reported ransom of HK$1 billion was paid. E-mail to a friend

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