Taipei prosecutors yesterday indicted an associate professor at the Central Police University (CPU) for allegedly passing information on the activities of Chinese and other foreigners in Taiwan to China.
Wu Chang-yu (吳彰裕), 53, an associate professor with the school’s Department of Administrative Management, is accused of passing along information on the activities of Pakistanis in Taiwan, as well as information on Falun Gong practitioners and Tibetan independence activists.
Prosecutors said Wu met an official with the Beijing Municipal Government’s branch of the Taiwan Affairs Office named Chen Jiang (陳江) in 2006. Chen allegedly recruited Wu to spy for China and introduced a Chinese national, nicknamed “Hsiao Chang” (小張), as his contact.
Prosecutors added that in May 2008, Wu passed information on the activities of Pakistanis in Taiwan to Hsiao Chang in China’s Fujian Province, as well as e-mailing photographs of a Falun Gong center in Taipei in July of that year.
Prosecutors added that in August 2010, Hsiao Chang asked Wu to look into the immigration records of a Chinese national named Cui Weiping (崔衛平).
Cui is a professor at the Beijing Film Academy and had attended an event of 19 people in Beijing marking the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. She had also criticized Chinese authorities on Twitter for jailing a peaceful demonstrator.
Cui was invited to attend the Association for Asian Studies’ 62nd annual conference in the US in March 2010, but Beijing barred her from attending. That was the third time Beijing barred had Cui from traveling to the US.
Prosecutors said Wu had asked a former CPU student, Lin Po-hung (林柏宏), director of the Hsinchu County Police Bureau’s foreign affairs section, for Cui’s personal information, including her residential address in the US and recent activities in Tibet.
Prosecutors said Lin had instructed police officer Wu Tung-lin (吳東霖) to look into Cui’s information and Wu Tung-lin then allegedly passed it to Wu Chang-yu.
Prosecutors indicted Wu Chang-yu and Wu Tung-lin on charges of violating the National Security Act (國家安全法) and leaking confidential information in the Criminal Code.
Prosecutors said that because Lin had cooperated with the investigation and became a witness for the prosecution, they would suspend his indictment for two years.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
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