Two Taiwanese men have been arrested for allegedly smuggling raw duck tongues from China in the first such case amid lingering concerns over bird flu, an official said yesterday.
Investigators in central Taiwan nabbed the two men early Wednesday and confiscated nearly four tonnes of tongues from about a million ducks, said the official at the Bureau of Investigation.
The tongues, with a retail value of about NT10 million (US$317,000), were suspected to have been shipped from China, the official said.
They were destroyed immediately as China is considered vulnerable to bird flu, he said.
Cooked duck tongues are a delicacy among many locals and Hong Kong tourists.
Taiwan has slaughtered about 479,000 birds since H5N2, a less virulent strain of the bird flu which has hit the Asian region, was first detected at a chicken farm in the central county of Changhua in January last year.
It later banned imports of tigers, lions, wolves and other wild animals from most Southeast Asian countries as the fatal bird flu outbreak claimed more lives in the region.
Health experts have warned the H5N1 strain of the virus could lead to a pandemic if it mutated into a form which could be easily transmitted between humans.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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