A taxi driver drove 239km from Taipei City to Nantou County before he realized his passenger was not in the back, and was later accused of theft.
According to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, a businessman surnamed Kao (高), flagged down the taxi driver, Liu Fu-lien (劉福廉), in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山) at 1am sometime in April, saying that he wanted to go to Shueili Township (水里) in Nantou County.
Liu said Kao, who had been drinking, paid him NT$2,000 (US$66) in advance and began putting his bags in the trunk. These included a gift-wrapped toy racecar in a box, a leather bag, 1kg of shark fins, 4kg of scallops, 10kg each of beef shank and brisket and 1 bag of sliced deer antler.
Kao got in the car, but then remembering he had left something, went back into his home to get the item. When he returned the taxi had driven off with all his valuables
On being interviewed by police, Liu said he was innocent.
“I heard the door close and thought that the drunken passenger had got in, so I drove to Shueili and only turned round to ask him where he wanted to be dropped off when we got there,” Liu said, adding that it was only then that he realized the passenger was missing.
Liu said he immediately drove back to Taipei and searched for Kao in the area where he picked him up along Wanfang Road.
“I wanted to explain to him that I didn’t take his things and return the advance payment,” Liu said, adding that by that time Kao had already called the police.
The prosecutors’ office asked Liu how he did not notice he had no passenger all the way from Taipei to Nantou.
“I respect my passenger’s privacy and didn’t look in the rearview mirror. Besides, I thought he was drunk and was lying down in the backseat, which was why I didn’t see him,” Liu said.
To check Liu’s story, the prosecutors examined data from the dashboard camera, finding that he did drive to Nantou County’s Shueili Road Sec 1 before turning back, stopping for gas near Taichung Industrial Park and New Taipei City’s (新北市) Tucheng District (土城).
According to mapping software calculations, the trip was 478km in length.
The prosecutors’ office yesterday closed the case, finding Liu not guilty of theft, citing evidence from the dashboard camera.
The office said that Liu was innocent because he had left all of Kao’s items with the police and Kao had since reclaimed his belongings.
Translated by Jake Chung, Staff Writer
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