Kaohsiung prosecutors' interrogation of Lee Tai-an (李泰安), the elder brother of deceased train derailment suspect Lee Shuang-chuan (李雙全), took a new turn yesterday when prosecutors collected samples of Lee's saliva and hair.
Lawyer Wu Han-cheng (吳漢成), Lee Tai-an's defense counsel, said that he had not accompied his client during yesterday's interrogation and that prosecutors had not notified him of yesterday's activities.
"I realized that Lee Tai-an had been interrogated again when I saw the TV news. [The Kaohsiung prosecutor] told me nothing about the interrogation," Wu said.
"I did not know that they would collect samples of Lee Tai-an's saliva and hair, either," Wu said.
He said that the samples would be of no benefit in the investigation of the case.
He went on to hypothesize that prosecutors may have been attempting to establish whether Lee Tai-an was a drug addict.
"[Prosecutors] did not tell me that they would do this [collecting Lee Tai-an's saliva and hair.] However, the law does not say that they can't do this," Wu said.
A number of Chinese-language newspapers such as the China Times and the United Daily News, among others, all reported that Lee Tai-an had confessed and admitted to parts of the crime to prosecutors on Wednesday. In addition, prosecutors were also alleged to have retrieved sufficient evidence to bring a case against Lee Tai-an.
Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office denied the allegations.
Meanwhile, the prosecutors' office would not explain why prosecutors decided to collect samples of Lee Tai-an's saliva and hair, in response to comments from Lee Tai-an's defense counsel that he believed that it had nothing to do with the case.
"I would say that the media's reporting on the latest development of the case may not be necessarily true. However, due to a gagging order, I will not tell you exactly what happened during the interrogations," said Chung Chung-hsiao (鍾忠孝), a Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office spokesman.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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