A former clerk with the Bureau of Immigration (now the National Immigration Agency) was indicted on Tuesday on charges of colluding with "snakeheads" in smuggling Chinese prostitutes into Taiwan in exchange for cash rewards.
The Taipei Prosecutor's Office charged Lee Juo-ling (
Meanwhile, 145 other suspects -- including tour operators, the human trafficking ring mastermind, Chinese women and their local bogus marriage partners -- were also indicted on charges of fraud and of violating the Statute Governing the Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例).
The indictment document said that Lee, a former member of a liaison task force with the Legislative Yuan, was very familiar with the processing procedures for Chinese women's entry permit applications because of her long years of service at the immigration office.
Lee is suspected of having told the human trafficking ring led by Chung Ju-chi (
Under the scheme, the indictment said, 82 Chinese women had managed to enter Taiwan via marriages of convenience, among whom 34 had received direct assistance from Lee.
The Chinese women tended to pose as brides of Taiwanese men before turning to prostitution, the indictment said.
For each case, Lee is believed to have received from NT$30,000 (US$910) to NT$80,000 and is believed to have raked in NT$2.04 million in bribes, while the human trafficking ring made about NT$6.8 million in total.
Lee was fired by the immigration office late last October after she was taken into custody pending an investigation. Chung and two accomplices were also held incommunicado to prevent them from coordinating their stories.
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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