A taxi driver who was accused of sexually assaulting a junior-high school girl has presumably been shot dead by two of the girl’s relatives, Chiayi County police said, adding that the two suspects were arrested on Tuesday night.
Chiayi police said the victim surnamed Wu, 40, did not return home after receiving a telephone call and driving away in his taxi on April 29.
His family reported him missing the next day, police said.
Police discovered that Kung Yu-chih (龔友智) had called Wu’s taxi service on April 29, which was the last phone call Wu answered.
Police said surveillance footage of that night showed Wu’s taxi near a bridge in the county’s Shueishang Township (水上).
Kung, 34, and another suspect named Lin Hung (林弘), 22, surrendered to the police on Tuesday night with a pistol allegedly used to murder Wu.
Police quoted the suspects as saying that they took control of Wu’s vehicle and took him to a roadside by Pachang Creek (八掌溪).
Wu denied raping the girl, which provoked Lin to fire two shots at Wu’s head, while Kung hit Wu’s head with a baseball bat, police said.
The two hid Wu’s body in the trunk of Kung’s car and drove around to find a place to hide the body, they said.
The two decided to hide the taxi and its location has not yet been determined, they added.
Police said Kung slept in the car and stayed with the body for four nights before it started to rot.
The pair allegedly hid the body in a gutter in the township on Saturday.
Police discovered the body in the gutter yesterday morning.
The two will be charged with homicide, police said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,