Taipei prosecutors indicted 36 alleged members of the notorious Four Seas gang (
Gang bosses Yang Kuang-nan (楊光南), Lien Cheng-yu (練成瑜) and Chou Hsing-hua (鄒興華) were among the names listed on the indictment list.
Prosecutors suspect the bosses helped gangsters run underground banks, futures markets and illegal casinos.
The gangsters were charged under the Organized Crime Prevention Act (
Prosecutors requested that the Taipei District Court sentence Yang and Lien to six years in prison while a five-year sentence was requested for Chou.
Prosecutors said the bosses were "clever gangsters" who live in luxurious residences around Taipei and associate with heads of companies and celebrities.
Prosecutors said the gangsters lent funds to white-collar individuals, but used violence to force them to pay back their debts.
Prosecutors said Lien is a low-profile gangster who worked behind the scenes.
He also said he was the main provider of funds for day-to-day operations.
Prosecutors said the indictments would deal a severe blow to organized crime.
Prosecutors said Lien is a shareholder in the local operator of US-based cable channel HBO.
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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