Hong Kong supermarket hit over "tsunami" advertisement

HONG KONG, Friday (AFP) - A Hong Kong supermarket chain has been attacked for using a tsunami image in a new advertisement that critics say is offensive to victims of last year's tsunami disaster, a report said Friday.

The promotion by groceries giant Park-n-Shop, which is controlled by Asia's richest man Li Ka-shing, depicts a huge wave of plastic bags engulfing the earth in a message hoped to encourage shoppers to use fewer polluting plastic carrier bags.

But the environmental group Friends of the Earth have hit out, saying the ad was "inconsiderate" to those who lost family members in the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunamis that killed some 217,000 people.

The poster, which will go into circulation next week, was "strange and unpleasant" the green group's spokesman Hahn Chu Hon-keung was quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post newspaper.

Hong Kong lost 28 people to the waves, sparked by a giant earthquake deep below the ocean off the coast of northern Indonesia.