A businessman was found guilty yesterday by the Taiwan High Court’s Greater Kaohsiung Branch of allegedly collecting military secrets for China.
Liu Cheng-ping (劉正平) was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison by the court. The case can still be appealed to the Supreme Court.
Liu was accused of being persuaded by the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) General Staff Department to collect military secrets for China.
The ruling said that in January 2008, Liu became acquainted with a man named Chuang Yan-chuan (莊硯全) and learned that -Chuang kept more than 90,000 items of confidential military documents in 100 CDs for Lieutenant Colonel Chang Te-jen (張德仁).
Those documents included classified information concerning Han Kuang exercises, Taiwan’s military deployments and mobilizations.
On June 19, 2008, Liu went to Chuang’s house in Tainan and selected 150 items that he copied onto CDs, the ruling said, adding that two months later, Liu took the CDs to China and handed them to personnel from the PLA’s General Staff Department.
In August and September of the same year, Liu tried to get military communication codes from the military’s Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology.
Those codes included codes for the military’s commendation system, military intelligence and exercises, the ruling said.
Chuang is being charged with violations of the National Security Act (國家安全法) at a separate trial and was being investigated by military prosecutors.
Taiwan is to receive the first batch of Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70 jets from the US late this month, a defense official said yesterday, after a year-long delay due to a logjam in US arms deliveries. Completing the NT$247.2 billion (US$7.69 billion) arms deal for 66 jets would make Taiwan the third nation in the world to receive factory-fresh advanced fighter jets of the same make and model, following Bahrain and Slovakia, the official said on condition of anonymity. F-16 Block 70/72 are newly manufactured F-16 jets built by Lockheed Martin to the standards of the F-16V upgrade package. Republic of China
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A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
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