HONG KONG: The underground path had “one end in a rented garage in Shenzhen and another in a thicket of reeds in Hong Kong, totally concealed,” said a report posted on its official website.“It was dug in a totally professional way,” it said.
Semi-autonomous Hong Kong, along with Shenzhen in mainland China, are both important trade hubs for the fast-growing and massive market.
But the two have very different tariff systems.
The as-yet unidentified smugglers sought to exploit their proximity by building a 40-meter-long underground passage and installing a rail track and wagon with a block-and-tackle system to ferry goods such as cell phones and tablet computers.
The tunnel stood about 0.8 meters wide and 1 meter high, just big enough for an adult to crawl through.
It started from a remote area of Shenzhen, in a garage full of bags packed with sludge dug up from the tunnel, and ended in a cluster of tall reeds a few meters past a river dividing mainland China and Hong Kong, with the nearest village 20 meters away.
The project was estimated to have cost three million yuan ($490,000) and taken four months to build.
Border officers discovered the tunnel a week ago, and a nearby resident said she heard drilling noises for one or two nights but assumed they were for renovations.
The man who rented the garage had used a fake ID, authorities were quoted as saying
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