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Navy beefs up its security after bank robbery at base

As the bank robbery which happened last week in broad daylight at the navy's base in Kaohsiung's Tsoying was cracked by the police, the navy began to review security measures at the base.

One of the first problems that has been found is that too many passes have been issued to both military personnel and civilians, which might put the security of the base at great risk, naval officials said yesterday.

Passes to the base are also of too many kinds, making it difficult for guards to tell which ones are authentic. At the same time, they are easy to counterfeit. The forged ones look just like real ones, since it does not require complicated printing techniques to produce them.

A bank robbery which happened last Wednesday at the Tsoying base was committed by three men who held forged passes to the base. One of the suspects was captured by the police on Sunday. He was identified as 26-year-old Chi Chih (齊智), who lives in a military village neighboring the base. He was reported to be a grandson of a retired navy sailor, whose brother had also served with the navy and retired at the rank of vice admiral.

A naval official said the navy should stop the indiscriminately issuing of passes to the base.

"Before the robbery, many civilians held passes to the base for one reason or another. Many of these civilians were able to get the passes because they frequently patronized a golf course within the base," the official said.

"The base accepted constant visits by these civilians for the purpose of making money. But the security of the base might be compromised as a result," he said.

The many different passes issued is due to the fact that there are many different kinds of units at the base and each unit has its own pass.

Soldiers guarding the entrances to the base thus need to ensure only that military personnel or civilians coming in carry one of the many passes accepted within the base. It is estimated that more than 5,000 people go in and out of the base every day, with quite a number of them being civilians.

Besides the pass problem, the Tsoying naval base is also short of troops to maintain security.

When the bank was robbed last Wednesday, most of the troops had been summoned to the port to provide security for a visit of navy commander-in-chief Admiral Miao Yung-ching (苗永慶).

Admiral Miao was at the base for the return of a flotilla from an inter-continental voyage to Latin America that lasted several months.
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