The New Taipei City (新北市) Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted Hu Tsung-hsien (胡宗賢) and Chu Ya-tung (朱亞東) over their suspected roles in a failed bombing attempt on a high-speed rail train in April and asked for the heaviest punishment possible.
Both Hu and Chu are being indicted on charges of attempted murder, attempted arson and forgery.
Prosecutors claim that Hu’s motives were not simply to express his dissatisfaction with society, adding that he also attempted to gain personal profit from short-selling various stocks prior to the attempted attack.
Hu spent a lot of time looking up Clostridium botulinum (a toxin-producing bacterium) and how to remotely detonate explosive devices using a mobile phone, prosecutors said.
The indictment said that Hu, with Chu’s aid, placed explosive devices on northbound high-speed rail train No. 616 as well as outside the Tucheng District (土城), New Taipei City, constituency office of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lu Chia-chen (盧嘉辰).
Prosecutors further charged Hu with giving suitcases containing explosives to Lu’s office in the name of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) saying they were to be given to Hon Hai Group chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘).
Prosecutors discovered that after Hu had allegedly placed the explosive devices on the high-speed train, he used the Internet to place an order to short-sell 500 shares.
All four bombs failed to explode due to either mishandling on Chu’s part or design flaws, prosecutors said.
The two suspects fled Taiwan and flew to China after allegedly planting the explosive devices. Chinese authorities — with the aid of facial recognition software — apprehended the pair in Guangdong on April 14 and repatriated them to Taiwan on April 16.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS