A 35-year-old Japanese man died after being hit by a southbound train at Neili (內壢) train station in Taoyuan County yesterday at 7am, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday, adding it was uncertain how the man fell onto the tracks.
“We are still investigating whether it was an accident or if he intended to jump. We are not ruling out anything at the moment,” the bureau’s First Section Chief Yan Chia-nan (顏嘉男) said.
Kunimitsu Ando reportedly entered Taiwan via Kaohsiung on Tuesday on a business visa.
Ando’s next of kin have been contacted and are on their way to Taiwan.
Local news reports quoted witnesses as saying Ando jumped down to the tracks shortly before the train arrived at the station. Others said he was trying to catch the incoming train and tried to reach the other platform by crossing the tracks.
The Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) said the southbound Fusing Semi-Express Train No. 101 was delayed for 60 minutes, affecting 13 other services and about 6,800 passengers.
The network was back to a normal service within two hours.
In related news, the TRA confirmed that a woman in Changhua County died after being hit by a train yesterday at around 9:30am. Witnesses said the woman lay down on the tracks in front of a train as it pulled into the station. Police suspect it was a suicide.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift