The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday released the official post-mortem report on the six inmates who died during a jailbreak bid at Kaohsiung Prison this month, which upholds the assessment that the six committed suicide.
The report states that the tests and autopsies indicate the inmates died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head, including the two men who shot left-handed, and therefore the deaths were suicides.
However, the release of the report has done little to quell speculation about the official version of events during the 14-hour drama in the prison in the city’s Daliao District (大寮), which began on the afternoon of Feb. 11 and ended before dawn the next morning.
Questions have been raised about prison warden Chen Shih-chih’s (陳世志) account and whether he — and others — have tried to cover-up what happened in the prison.
A spokesman for the prosecutors’ office said it would investigate reports that Chen had instructed staff members to drive two cars into the facility after the six inmates demanded vehicles to flee the prison.
It is an offense to provide assistance to criminals trying to escape the law, the spokesman said.
Police units surrounding the prison did not allow the two vehicles to enter the facility.
A prosecutor also confirmed yesterday that Chen had an M&P 9mm pistol, the main handgun used by police and prison guards, when the prison siege ended.
In the aftermath of the siege, eyewitnesses said that Chen had said he had been given a gun by one of the inmates, surnamed Huang (黃), just before the six men decided to kill themselves instead of surrendering.
When asked by reporters on Tuesday whether he had left the prison carrying a gun, Chen denied it.
He backtracked yesterday.
Questions had been raised earlier about the version of events Chen gave the media and investigators, after a courier truck driver who was locked up in a nearby room during the prison siege told investigators that he heard Chen trying to convince the six inmates to kill themselves instead of surrendering. Chen said he had tried to persuade the men to give themselves up to the police.
When asked yesterday about the differing accounts, Deputy Minister of Justice Chen Ming-tang (陳明堂) said: “Through the prison siege there were flaws in handling of the situation. We will take them up as the reference basis for meting out punishment in the coming days.”
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