The Chiayi District Court yesterday said the trial of a man charged with decapitating his sister has been concluded, with a ruling to be delivered next month.
The woman’s decapitated head was found sprinkled with salt and wrapped in clothing and layers of plastic bags with a note in the men’s lavatory at Shangtian Temple in Shueishang Township (水上) on March 15 last year.
Chen Chia-fu (陳佳富), 38, the brother of the murder victim, Chen Wan-ting (陳婉婷), 37, was charged with murdering his younger sister, reportedly to claim insurance money.
Prosecutors yesterday asked the judges to sentence the defendant to death, saying: “Chen Chia-fu showed no remorse and tried to avoid prosecution by pretending he had a serious mental disorder.”
Chen Chia-fu’s attorney told the judges that although the court commissioned National Taiwan University Hospital to examine Chen Chia-fu’s mental state and the hospital concluded in a report that he did not suffer from any mental issues, he attempted to commit suicide three times when he was 22 years old and former psychological examinations showed he suffered mental problems.
Chen Chia-fu’s mother urged the judges to forgive her son and give him “a chance.”
Prosecutors argued that Chen Chia-fu took out several insurance polices for his sister so that after killing her he could cash them in.
Prosecutors said that Chen Chia-fu strangled Chen Wan-ting to death in their apartment in New Taipei City before cutting her body into pieces with a cooking knife.
Chen Chia-fu processed his sister’s body with a meat grinder, diluted the ground body parts with water and disposed of them down the bathroom drain, it said, adding that he disposed of the rest of the corpse before leaving the severed head in the temple in Chiayi County, prosecutors added.
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:
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