The bodies of six Indonesian workers who were killed in a construction site accident in Nantou County late last month will be shipped home as long as Indonesia’s liaison office in Taiwan produces the necessary documents, a prosecutor said yesterday.
The bodies of the six dead men, all undocumented migrant workers who had fled their previous Taiwanese employers and overstayed their visas for up to three years, have been kept at a mortuary in Nantou County.
Seven workers, including the six Indonesians, were killed and two others were injured after a sprawling network of scaffolding at a construction site for a No. 6 Freeway exit ramp collapsed on Sept. 30.
A funeral service was held at the home of Chuang Yung-ho (莊永和), the only Taiwanese worker killed in the accident, in Nantou yesterday morning.
The bodies of the six Indonesians, however, remain at the mortuary and cannot be shipped home because none of their relatives have come from Indonesia for DNA comparison to facilitate their identification, which Taiwanese authorities say is necessary before the bodies can be sent back to Indonesia.
Prosecutor Huang Chien-ming (黃建銘) said that in order to -facilitate the repatriation of the bodies, the Nantou Prosecutors’ Office has asked the Indonesian Economic and Trade Office in Taipei — Indonesia’s representative office in Taiwan — to produce documents proving their identities and their families’ authorization papers.
So far, the Indonesian office has produced only one family’s authorization papers, Huang said.
“These documents are necessary for the dead Indonesians’ return and their compensation,” Huang said.
Huang said the bodies have been kept at the mortuary in accordance with Muslim custom — in caskets, with their hands crossed on the breast and covered with a white sheet, -accompanied with Koran chanting.
There were 151,723 Indonesian workers in Taiwan as of the end of August, according to figures from the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training. That accounts for more than 40 percent of the 372,146 migrant workers in Taiwan.
Just over 85 percent of Indonesian workers — 129,046 out of 151,723 — were working in Taiwan in August as caregivers, while less than 1 percent were employed in the construction industry, the figures showed.
The accident has raised concerns about the hiring of illegal migrant workers, with Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) pledging to enforce a crackdown on undocumented foreign workers and on employers and contractors who illegally hire them.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching