Prosecutors in Pingtung City sought the death sentence on Thursday for an Indonesian deckhand charged with murder.
After a two-month investigation, the Pingtung District Prosecutors Office asked that Takhari, a deckhand on the Taiyihsiang, a fishing boat working out of Pingtung County’s Liouciou (琉球) harbor, be sentenced to death for masterminding the murder of the vessel’s Taiwanese skipper, Lee Feng-pao (李豐寶), on the high seas near Guam on Aug. 20.
Lee was the only Taiwanese national on the tuna vessel, which set out from Liouciou on July 12 and lost contact with fishery authorities on Aug. 19. It was crewed by eight Indonesian deckhands.
The Pingtung prosecutors also sought life sentences for two other crewmen, identified as Didit Wardoyo and Dartam Dulbari, as Takhari’s accomplices.
The prosecutors’ indictment said Takhari masterminded a mutiny and asked Wardoyo and Dulbari to join him in an “action” on Aug. 20.
Lee was urinating off the vessel’s port side facing the ocean at around 10am on Aug. 20 when Wardoyo and Dulbari came at him from behind, grabbing his legs and tipping him overboard, the indictment said.
Takhari then took the helm of the vessel and sailed for Indonesia. He calmed the five other deckhands by promising them that they would share the income after the vessel’s catch was sold, the indictment said.
The prosecutors also asked that the remaining five be sentenced to one year in prison for condoning the action out of greed.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) dispatched a vessel on a search for the Taiyihsiang in late August after Lee’s family, fearing that he was a victim of foul play, filed an appeal for help. The CGA also asked for help from the authorities in Palau and Indonesia, whose governments responded to Taiwan’s requests and prepared to intercept the boat.
Because the automatic response mechanism of the Taiyihsiang’s global positioning system had not been switched off, CGA patrolmen spotted the hijacked vessel in waters near Palau on Aug. 29.
Upon boarding the vessel and failing to find Lee, the officers took control and sailed it back to Pingtung for investigation, the indictment said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods