The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday confirmed that a Taiwanese fishing boat was chased off the Somali coast by pirates for several hours at about midnight. One crew member was wounded during the incident.
The vessel had since evaded the pirate ship and was heading for the Maldives, the ministry said.
Samuel Chen (陳士良), director-general of the ministry’s Department of African Affairs, told a press briefing that the fishing boat Ruei Man Fa was chased by a light boat sent by a larger pirate ship passing off as a Taiwanese vessel about 395 nautical miles (731km) southeast of Somalia’s Cape Guardafui.
Hsu Ching-tsuan (許清鑽), the captain of the fishing boat, said the light boat fired between 50 and 60 rounds at the Taiwanese boat during the chase, hitting an Indonesian crew member in the thigh.
The bullet did not hit any major arteries and the bleeding soon stopped, Chen said.
The fishing boat has a crew of 14, two of them Taiwanese nationals, Chen said.
The light boat appeared to have given up the chase around 3:55am and the Taiwanese vessel headed toward the Maldives at a speed of 9 knots per hour, he said, adding that it would take the vessel about 100 hours to reach its destination.
Chen said the ministry received an emergency notice about the attack at about 1am, after which the department informed the Piracy Reporting Center at the International Maritime Organization’s International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur.
The ministry also asked Mauritius-based personnel from the Fisheries Agency to ensure the wounded crew member received medical treatment after the boat arrives in the Maldives, Chen 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