The Taipei District Court yesterday granted a prosecutors’ request to detain three men suspected of abusing a three-year-old boy, resulting in his death.
During the investigation of the incident, which took place in New Taipei City (新北市), investigators found that the victim’s father, a man surnamed Liu (劉) who has a history of drug abuse, placed his son in the care of two men surnamed Hsu (許) and Chou (周), both of whom also have drug-related records, prosecutors said.
They said Chou and Hsu forced the boy to drink rice wine, then taped his mouth shut before whipping his legs with cable wires and pulling out his fingernails with -pliers.
The suspects allegedly told prosecutors that they tortured the boy because he wouldn’t stop crying.
Prosecutors said Chou and Hsu contacted Liu when they realized that the boy had stopped breathing. Liu then directed another man, surnamed Cheng (鄭), to inject the boy with diluted drugs in an attempt to revive him, but to no avail, prosecutors said.
The men then took the boy to Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital in Sindian Distict (新店) and left him there, they said.
Hsu, Chou and Cheng were arrested on Thursday and charged with manslaughter.
After interrogating the men, prosecutors requested that the Taipei District Court grant permission to detain the suspects.
The three men were quoted by prosecutors as saying they were misled by Liu’s instructions.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said it had not excluded the possibility of detaining Liu for further questioning.
The boy’s mother only learned that her son had died from watching a news report on television and she then hurried to the hospital, prosecutors said.
However, because the mother is wanted in connection with a separate drug case, she was detained by the Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office, prosecutors said.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
RSS