Ministry of Justice officials confirmed yesterday that they have received the parole application of the man widely known as the "Hwakang Wolf" (華岡之狼) and said that the decision by the ministry may be made as soon as today.
The decision will be crucial to whether the man can successfully become a freshman at the National Taiwan University (NTU) this fall.
The "Wolf," identified only by his surname, Yang (楊), was convicted eight years ago on charges of theft and 27 counts of rape.
Most of his victims were female college students in Taipei City's Shihlin and Peitou areas.
He began his jail time at the Taipei Prison on Nov. 19, 1996.
He took the Joint College Entrance Exam in the summer of 2001 and gained admission to the Sociology Department at NTU. But his application for parole has been denied twice over the past two years.
"His case is being processed. As long as the deputy minister approves his request, he will be able to get parole and become a freshman as he wishes," said Huang Cheng-nan (黃徵男), the director of the justice ministry's Department of Corrections.
"It is possible that his application could be approved before the end of this week," Huang said
An department official who wished to remain anonymous said that Yang filed his third parole application to the Taipei Prison, where he is serving his 16-year sentence, last week and his parole request was preliminarily approved by the prison's rehabilitation committee.
The committee then submitted his application to the ministry for a final evaluation and approval.
According Taiwan's Criminal Code, which was amended in 1997, an inmate has to serve half of his prison sentence before he is qualified to apply for parole.
However, Yang's case was reviewed and considered when the old regulations, which require only that he serve one-third of his sentence, were still in place.
After his first parole application was turned down in 2001, Yang managed to gain a one-year leave from NTU sociology department to keep his admission valid for another year.
However, his second parole application was also rejected.
NTU notified Yang last year that his leave of absence was to expire last September and that he had to be enrolled and pay the tuition fee for that year or he would lose his admission.
It turned out that Yang paid the tuition fee and filed a one-year drop-out application for another year.
Now NTU has said that Yang would have to either go back to school and begin his classes or he would lose his admission placement for good.
If Yang loses his place, he will have to take the entrance exam again if he wants to gain admission to any university in the country.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,