The Qigong group Tai Ji Men (太極門) sued Taipei Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁) yesterday for filing fraud charges against the president of the group in a case that dragged on for 10 years before the defendant was cleared.
To the sound of traditional qigong drumming, more than 20 Tai Ji Men members arrived at the Taipei District Prosecutors Office to file a slander and malpractice lawsuit against Hou with the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors’ Office.
The group’s attorney, Tsai Fu-chiang (蔡富強), said Hou indicted Hong Shih-ho (洪石和) and several of his followers on fraud charges in 1997. The defendants were found not guilty recently — 10 years and seven months after they were first indicted and detained.
PHOTO: FANG PIN-CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
Hou ordered the detention of four Tai Ji Men followers for allegedly helping Hong to solicit donations, Tsai said.
The attorney said the courts had ruled in January the four were eligible for compensation for wrongful detention, and the Control Yuan had also said that Hou had abused his prosecutorial power during the investigation process.
The group’s many hardships over the last 10 years had been caused by Hou, Tsai said.
Hong, who is also known as Hong Tao-tze (洪道子), founded Tai Ji Men in 1966. The group has tens of thousands of practitioners, and has also has two centers on the West Coast of the US.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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