President Chen Shui-bian (
The government should launch a full-scale probe into "career students" who spied on political dissidents for the government, he said.
As Taiwan has become a democracy governed by the rule of law, it is not acceptable that political parties should get away with having colluded with gangsters in political assassinations, he said.
Chen made the remarks in an address to the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) Central Executive Committee yesterday afternoon.
Chen said the government should continue the investigation of political murders committed during the KMT era, including the murders of former DPP chairman Lin I-hsiung's family (
Lin's six-year-old twin daughters and his mother were murdered on Feb. 28, 1980, while he was in jail for participating in democracy demonstrations in Kaohsiung in December 1979.
The attack is believed to have been politically motivated, as it occurred on the anniversary of the 228 Incident.
Chen Wen-cheng was found dead on the grounds of National Taiwan University a day after being questioned by secret police in 1981.
Henry Liu was killed on Oct. 16 at his house in San Francisco by a Taiwanese gangster commissioned by the Military Intelligence Bureau.
Liu's widow, Tsui Ron-chi (
The president accused organized crime syndicates of portraying Liu's assassination as a heroic act at the funeral of his murderer, Bamboo Union crime boss Chen Chi-li (陳啟禮). The administration will not tolerate social order being disturbed, the president said.
KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
"[He] is only interested in these cases at election time. He has done nothing to solve them and is raising them after I promised to reopen the cases," Ma said.
Ma, during a visit to Green Island earlier this month, expressed sympathy with victims of past political persecution and pledged to improve the accountability of the intelligence and national security apparatus and to open fresh investigations into several prominent unsolved cases of political persecution if elected president.
In related news, former DPP chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (
"I am not surprised at the [plotted] political murder at all and I admire Jimmy Wang (
Wang told the Liberty Times, (the Taipei Times' sister paper) last Tuesday that the KMT regime had asked him to assassinate Hsu, who was living in the US at the time.
Hsu fled to the US in 1979 during a crackdown on independence advocates in Taiwan and lived there for 10 years. He now lives in Taiwan.
Hsu said he would have died if God hadn't protected him, because the KMT did send an assassin, who attempted to kill him at a demonstration.
"I almost got killed by a gang member in public," he said, adding that the attempt on his life occurred at a political rally in 1981, when a man rushed at him with a large knife, narrowly missing his head.
The KMT wanted to make the killing look like a personal dispute, he said, adding that the assassin had shouted: "Hsu Hsin-liang, why did you send someone to beat me up?"
Hsu called on the KMT, which has dismissed Wang's accusation, to come clean over its history.
Additional reporting by Mo Yan-chih
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,