Taipei prosecutors yesterday said they are investigating whether Taipei police officers were involved in distributing sex photographs and videos allegedly taken by Justin Lee (李宗瑞), who has been accused of committing sexual crimes.
Lee, a socialite wanted for allegedly drugging and raping several celebrities and other women and filming the acts, turned himself in to prosecutors on Thursday evening after spending more than three weeks on the run.
He was taken into custody following a hearing at the Taipei District Court.
Some of the photographs, believed to be stills taken from the videos, were found posted on the Internet shortly after Lee went on the run.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday that prosecutors have discovered that a Taipei police officer surnamed Chen (陳), who was on the task force dealing with Lee’s case, allegedly went to Lee’s father, former Yuanta Financial Holdings board member Lee Yueh-tsang (李岳蒼), and attempted to blackmail him with the photographs and videos.
Because Lee Yueh-tsang rejected the blackmail, the materials were then posted on the Internet, the Apple Daily reported.
Huang Ming-chao (黃明昭), chief of the Taipei City Police Department’s criminal police section, said yesterday he made a phone call to Lee Yueh-tsang in which the latter denied the media report that police officers had tried to blackmail him.
Meanwhile, Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office spokesman Huang Mo-hsin (黃謀信) said he has no comment on the Apple Daily story, adding only that prosecutors are investigating the case.
During the district court hearing, 27-year-old Justin Lee denied the accusations made against him, saying his sexual activities had all been consensual and that he did not secretly film the acts or circulate any photographs and videos of him engaging in sexual acts with women.
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