Kyopo crime story of the day

Western visitors to Korea like to talk about two things: dog consumption and the propensity for South Koreans to say "Fighting!" for just about anything.

So it was only a matter of time before an unscrupulous someone would combine dogs and "Fighting!" to get, um, dogfighting:

Police [in the Philippines] have arrested six South Koreans suspected of running a massive, high-tech dogfighting operation where matches in the Philippines were shown online to overseas bettors, according to police.

About 240 pitbulls were confiscated in the raid late Friday from a secluded compound where the dogs were kept and the matches held, the local police intelligence chief said on Saturday.

"They had an arena enclosed with mirrors. They had videocams, computers and they would show live fights of the pitbulls and it could be seen on their website in Korea," Chief Inspector Romeo Valero said.

He told AFP that Filipino caretakers hired to take care of the animals said the dogfighting operation in a rural area about an hour's drive south of Manila had been going on for over a month, and sometimes dogs would die from their injuries. [AFP]

Sorry about that lame attempt at humor earlier. I'm not trying to make light of this, which is blatant animal cruelty on a large scale. And I'm just pleased as punch that people like this would get shut down.

Apparently, though, they are going with the infamous Poker-8 gang's defense after they were arrested for running "high-stakes" poker from their home and publicizing it on Facebook:

He said the Koreans did not know how to speak English and it was not yet known how long they had been in the country. One Korean claimed they did not know dogfighting was illegal in the Philippines.

They face six months to two years in prison for the dogfighting, but authorities will have difficulty charging them with illegal gambling because the money was managed overseas. One would hope that the Philippine authorities would hand over that part of their investigation to the South Korean authorities, which are in a position to haul these people to jail over the gambling portion of this.

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