Taiwan's law enforcement agencies will make public the entire contents of the report regarding the March 19 shooting of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) when they feel the time is right, US-based forensic scientist Henry Lee (李昌鈺) said on Saturday.
Report
Lee, who was asked by the government to help examine the attempted assassination site and the two bullets found there, delivered his report on Aug. 28.
Lee said he guesses that investigators have yet to make the report public because they themselves have not obtained enough evidence.
"If the report is publicized, it may scare away suspects or lead to further destruction of evidence," Lee said.
Lee led a team to Taiwan in April to examine Chen and Lu's wounds, inspect the scene of the shooting and tour the hospital where Chen and Lu were taken for medical treatment.
Lee made the remarks after delivering a speech on his life in the US in Rosemead, a city near Los Angeles, on Saturday.
He was asked by reporters his opinion on why Taiwan has not released the full results of his report more than two months after it was presented to State Public Prosecutor-General Ru Jen-fa (盧仁發) prior to Ru's retirement in September.
Lee also said that he suggested that an independent investigation committee be established to investigate into all matters surrounding the election-eve shooting.
Independent
He added that members of the independent investigation committee should come from parties across the political spectrum and all the material in the report should be reviewed by completely neutral individuals before further investigations begin.
Lee reiterated that the way to crack the shooting case is to find the gun, believed to be a remodeled handgun, or the underground gunsmith where the weapon was made, or find the gunman who fired the two shots.
He said that he arrived at the scene in Tainan on April 9, almost 20 days after the shooting and, therefore, had great difficulty in reconstructing the scene.
As a forensic expert, Lee said his job is to reconstruct the scene and find as many clues as possible, not to crack the case.
In his report, Lee shed no new light on the case, in which little headway has been made with no major leads and no arrests after seven months.
Cause
He said in the report that the president's injury to the abdomen was caused by a bullet and that the bullets retrieved were not used in regular handguns.
The most significant finding in his draft report was the special "tool marks" on a shell casing found at the scene. Lee suggested in the report that police continue to aggressively search for and seize all illegal firearms in the country and "examine and compare all the guns."
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) today issued a sea warning for Typhoon Fung-wong effective from 5:30pm, while local governments canceled school and work for tomorrow. A land warning is expected to be issued tomorrow morning before it is expected to make landfall on Wednesday, the agency said. Taoyuan, and well as Yilan, Hualien and Penghu counties canceled work and school for tomorrow, as well as mountainous district of Taipei and New Taipei City. For updated information on closures, please visit the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration Web site. As of 5pm today, Fung-wong was about 490km south-southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan's southernmost point.
UNILATERAL MOVES: Officials have raised concerns that Beijing could try to exert economic control over Kinmen in a key development plan next year The Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) yesterday said that China has so far failed to provide any information about a new airport expected to open next year that is less than 10km from a Taiwanese airport, raising flight safety concerns. Xiamen Xiangan International Airport is only about 3km at its closest point from the islands in Kinmen County — the scene of on-off fighting during the Cold War — and construction work can be seen and heard clearly from the Taiwan side. In a written statement sent to Reuters, the CAA said that airports close to each other need detailed advanced
Tropical Storm Fung-Wong would likely strengthen into a typhoon later today as it continues moving westward across the Pacific before heading in Taiwan’s direction next week, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 8am, Fung-Wong was about 2,190km east-southeast of Cape Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, moving westward at 25kph and possibly accelerating to 31kph, CWA data showed. The tropical storm is currently over waters east of the Philippines and still far from Taiwan, CWA forecaster Tseng Chao-cheng (曾昭誠) said, adding that it could likely strengthen into a typhoon later in the day. It is forecast to reach the South China Sea
Almost a quarter of volunteer soldiers who signed up from 2021 to last year have sought early discharge, the Legislative Yuan’s Budget Center said in a report. The report said that 12,884 of 52,674 people who volunteered in the period had sought an early exit from the military, returning NT$895.96 million (US$28.86 million) to the government. In 2021, there was a 105.34 percent rise in the volunteer recruitment rate, but the number has steadily declined since then, missing recruitment targets, the Chinese-language United Daily News said, citing the report. In 2021, only 521 volunteers dropped out of the military, the report said, citing
RSS