Origin and History

The establishment of SDU can be traced back to an incident on March 13, 1971, when a plane from Philippine Airline were hijacked and landed in Kai Tak Airport. Though the incident were resolved peacefully, the Hong Kong Police Force became concerned that a similar incident would occur in the future. A "marksmen squad" (神槍手隊) was assembled in 1973 and later re-organised into the Special Duties Unit in 1974. On April 1974 the Sharpshooter team was officially renamed as Special Duties Unit (SDU). The SDU is subordinated to the Police Tactical Unit (PTU) and the PTU headquarters is located at Fan Ling.

At first the SDU was a small team consisting 30 officers. Due to the lack of experience the trainings were exceptionally harsh, hence many talented and dedicated officers quited. This situation changed in 1978 after the SDU was evaluated by the British Army's Special Air Service (SAS), which is a well-know counter-terrorism (CT) expert. This was the first major reform of the SDU structure.

The SDU operation team was divided into A and B teams, with trainings from the SAS. Tactics were developed to suit the unique environment of Hong Kong. In 1982, the marine division was formed with an initial strength of 12, which was probably related to a classified CT operation conducted by the Special Boat Service, the navy's counterpart of SAS. The combat divers were trained to perform maritime CT operations. The divers are more seen in security operations as well as search and rescue (SAR) operations.

In 1992 the team suffered a major setback in a near-catastrophic operation. The SDU officers, together with detectives from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau's (OCTB) officers conducted a search operation after receiving information on the whereabouts of an armed robbery group. The police arrived on the scene, the Guangzhou Building located in Tsuen Wan, which was a pre-war building that has no elevators. The SDU, instead of performing a dynamic entry, they taunted and threatened the gunmen, of which such tactics were proved to be successful before. Within seconds the armed robberies responded by firing Type-56 (Chinese copy of AK-47) and later throwing one stick grenade to the officers which had not exploded. The SDU officers then called in reinforcement. Afterward, the gunmen threw a grenade to the street, and they managed to escape the flat by climbing out of the windows. The SDU reinforcements just arrived the scene tried to prevent them from escaping, but resulted in several injuries, including the blinding of a SDU sniper when a robbery threw that grenade to the street. The operation ended by the capture of all the robberies (5 men 1 woman) after 6 hours of fire exchanges, leaving 7 policemen , 3 from SDU, seriously injured.

After this catastrophe the structure of SDU has once again changed, this time by their own. One of the changes is that the SDU will assume full command whenever they are required to carry out operations, leaving other officers the duty of setting up defense parameters and supporting roles only. The SDU team now consists of the following divisions:

1.) Operation Team, which is divided into Team A and Team B, together with the Sniper team. Team C is responsible for the training of SDU officers.

2.) The medical team, which consists of SDU officers with special trainings on battlefield first aids.

3.) The headquarters, which is responsible for all administrative works, as well as providing intelligences to the operations.

4.) The boat team, which maintains and operate the Zodiac vessels. The Zodiac vessels are also used by the US Navy SEAL Special Operation Force.

5.) The maintenance team, which maintain all land vehicles as well as the Asia's most advanced Close Quarter Battle (CQB) House.

Currently, the SDU has a strength of 100 officers. Officers of SDU ranged from constables to chief inspectors.