Police searched mountains near Yenping township in Taitung County yesterday after local residents spotted one individual believed to be one of three remaining prisoners who escaped from Taitung's Taiyuan Vocational Training Institute (
The man had not been located as of press time last night.
The man hunt was launched after police received a report from local residents in the Meishan Aboriginal community.
The man, who was seen crouching over a water fountain at around 10am, was described to police as having cropped hair and as being dressed "in gray clothes, much like a prisoner."
After he was spotted, local residents said he fled off into the woods.
Police said the man was very likely one of the escaped prisoners, since the site where he was discovered was close to the prison.
Four prisoners, serving sentences between 13 years to life, used the stormy weather caused by Typhoon Bilis as cover and successfully broke out of the prison late Tuesday night.
They were thought to have used a metal bar torn from a bed to break the concrete encasing the steel bars on a window, creating a gap just wide enough for a person to get through.
One of the fugitives, identified as Chen Yung-sung (
Officials had speculated that Chen might have been washed away by the river after falling off the riverbank or while trying to cross the river to flee to mountain areas.
Also yesterday, police found the body of a man in the mountains of Juiyuan, but later ruled out the possibility that it was one of the fugitives.
This is the third time that inmates have either escaped or tried to escape from one of Taiwan's detention facilities since early May.
Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) has said that official negligence must have been a factor in the jailbreak. Chen has also hinted that the country's correctional institutions may be in the grip of a widespread discipline problem.
The Taitung District Prosecutors' Office has set up a special task force headed by the district prosecutor-general to begin to try to assign criminal blame for the escape.
The justice ministry has also formed an investigative group to look into what officials at the correctional facility should be held responsible for.
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