A former judge and his son are suspected of shipping coal from North Korea to sell in Vietnam in contravention of UN sanctions on Pyongyang, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said on Monday.
The office said in a statement that Chiang Kuo-hua (江國華), a former Taiwan High Court judge, and his son, Chiang Heng (江衡), chartered a cargo ship via a Chinese intermediary to transport 4 tonnes of anthracite coal from a port in North Korea to Vietnam some time between August and September last year.
In addition to the Chiangs, two other men are also implicated in the case, the office said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The four have been named as defendants and were accused of assisting terrorists and forging documents.
More than 70 prosecutors and police officers on Sunday raided the headquarters of a company founded by the Chiangs and the residences of the four defendants.
Three of the defendants and four witnesses were questioned.
Prosecutors claim that the Chiangs and the two others fabricated the origin of the coal they transported.
During the journey, the Global Positioning System on the cargo ship was turned off to prevent it from being tracked, prosecutors said, adding that the former judge was hospitalized after claiming to be ill and failed to visit the office for questioning.
The office has issued an arrest warrant for him.
After questioning Chiang Heng, prosecutors believe that he was involved in the case and have applied to a court to detain him to prevent him destroying evidence or colluding with the other defendants.
The two other defendants have been released on bail of NT$100,000 each, they said.
Earlier this month, a Taiwanese was accused of involvement in a separate case in which he allegedly chartered a Hong Kong-registered vessel to secretly sell oil to North Korea.
The man denies the accusations.
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,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS