The Criminal Investigation Bureau said that it respects the opinion of the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee, but that it has no intention of responding to the allegations of the controversial committee, whose legal status is in doubt. Meanwhile, legal experts said that the report "will not make any difference."
The committee, comprised of pan-blue figures, claims that the election-eve shooting was staged based on allegations about the bullets recovered by police.
PHOTO: CNA
According to the report, which was made public on Monday, committee members said that they have "good reason" to believe that President Chen Shui-bian's (
The committee said that its study showed that the lead bullet was "not capable" of creating Chen's stomach wound. As a result of this "evidence," the committee said it was clear that the March 19 assassination attempt was a "crime staged for election purposes."
This assertion directly contradicts the results of the forensic tests conducted by the bureau and by the forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee (李昌鈺), who was invited to investigate the case at the urging of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
"All the evidence was screened and analyzed by our bureau's forensic scientists, as well as [independent investigator] Dr. Henry Lee," said Judy Cheng (
"The results of our study and Lee's arrived at the same conclusions. That is our burden of proof," she said.
"What we did was scientific and is indisputable. As far as what the committee said ... we will respect it, but will not respond to it at all. The most important task for us now is to find the gunman," she added.
Lawyer Yang Szu-chin (
"The Council of Grand Justices has already announced that portions of the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee Statute are unconstitutional and must be amended," Yang said. "Until that happens, whatever the committee does or says is irrelevant."
In the meantime, the police said that they will test-fire the homemade pistols and bullets that were made by Tang Shou-yi (唐守義), an underground gunsmith who is suspected of having manufactured the weapons and ammunition used in the shooting. This testing will supplement the large body of forensic evidence the bureau has already collected and used to make its forensic analysis.
Tang was initially arrested for running an illegal weapons factory in Tainan, and he was later confirmed to be the maker of the weapons used in the assassination attempt.
In addition to "suggesting" that the Legislative Yuan should recall Chen, the committee said the Control Yuan should impeach the premier and all members of the Cabinet.
The report said that the committee's investigation "showed that the assassination attempt was not an attempted suicide, not a murder and not a crime committed by a psycho."
It was not immediately clear what facts led the committee to draw these conclusions.
Nonetheless, the committee said it had "good reason" to believe that the shooting was staged because of "human manipulation" during the investigation. It then said that insufficient evidence had been produced regarding the shooting.
To bolster its claims of "human manipulation," the report said that National Security Council Secretary-General Chiou I-jen (
Furthermore, the committee said, the president and vice president had disappeared for "quite a long time" after the shooting.
Finally, the committee said, some security personnel were promoted in the months following the incident, instead of being punished.
"With these facts, it is hard to believe that the incident was not staged and related security personnel were not helping," the report said.
It also asserted that evidence related to the case had been "touched by too many people" before it was presented for forensic analysis.
Therefore, the committee said, the analysis by the bureau was not trustworthy.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS