Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday accused prosecutors of leaking information about an ongoing investigation and urged the Ministry of Justice to probe the matter.
The Chiayi Prosecutors’ Office and the Kaohsiung Prosecutors’ Office, which mobilized more than 400 investigators for raids and investigations into DPP Chiayi County Commissioner Helen Chang (張花冠) and DPP Legislator Chen Ming-wen (陳明文), a former Chiayi county commissioner, had violated the principle of not discussing cases under investigation, DPP Legislator Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) told a press conference yesterday.
Chang and Chen were detained on corruption allegations linked to a herbal medicine biotech park project in Chiayi County, but were later released on bail.
The prosecutors’ offices were suspected of leaking information to TV political commentators and the press because a political commentator had predicted the raids days before the investigation, DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said.
The leaks were likely an attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to persecute political enemies and divert public attention from the Lin Yi-shih (林益世) corruption scandal, DPP Legislator Chao Tien-lin (趙天麟) said.
“This vicious practice will only hurt people’s confidence in the judicial system, whose neutrality has been questioned for a long time,” Chao said.
Chao and DPP Legislator Lee Kun-tse (李昆澤) both urged the ministry to investigate the leak and said they did not rule out demanding a report from the ministry on the leak during the new legislative session.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift