Eight individuals under travel restriction snuck in and out of the country last week when the National Immigration Agency (NIA) computer system malfunctioned for 36 hours, NIA head Hsieh Li-gong (謝立功) said yesterday.
Hsie apologized and promised to attribute demerits within one week.
None of the eight people were high-profile individuals, Hsieh said, adding that the NIA would cooperate with law enforcement to bring the eight to justice.
The five individuals who fled the country include two people under watch for tax evasion, a runaway conscript, one put under travel restriction by a local prosecutor’s office and a wanted fugitive.
The three who entered the country included two fugitives and one on the prosecutor’s watch list, the NIA said.
One Vietnamese was also reported missing when he failed to complete the final step to exit the country.
“We have our own channels to locate the man, but he is not considered an illegal alien because his visa is valid until September,” Hsieh said at a press conference yesterday.
The two tax evaders would be asked to pay up their outstanding dues next time they enter the country.
The family of the draft dodger has been contacted and all overseas embassies and representative offices have been notified.
Hsieh said the 36-hour computer glitch on Monday and Tuesday was the result of “faulty hard drives.”
During the computer crash, immigration officers had to note the personal information of 46,921 travelers by hand.
The system was down again for 10 minutes on Thursday.
As a short-term solution, all Internet connections at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport will be upgraded from 10Mbps to 20Mbps by next month.
A new high-speed hard drive will be installed in both terminals by July and the agency plans to have a new computer system in four to six years, the NIA said.
Also See: Airport ‘glitch’ poses security risk
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,