Police have arrested four alleged members of a criminal gang in connection with the death of a teenager in Taichung, where the victim’s body was found covered in burn marks and wounds consistent with torture.
Police said they suspect the victim, Lin Hung-yu (林泓佑), 19, was tortured for more than 10 days, as preliminary examinations showed he suffered from cuts and burns.
The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office said the gang was made up of people in their teens and early 20s who were allegedly involved in telephone scams.
Prosecutors detained four suspects for questioning yesterday, including a 24-year-old woman surnamed Hsu (許) whom police allege was the ringleader of the gang, along with her 21-year-old brother, a 25-year-old man surnamed Lin (林) and a 19-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳), who was later transferred to the local juvenile court.
Police said the victim allegedly joined the gang with a friend, a 17-year-old surnamed Liao (廖), to work as money collectors.
However, police said that the gang believed the two teenagers did not hand over all the money they collected, pocketing NT$550,000.
Investigators allege the two teenagers were seized by gang members on Sunday last week and taken to Hsu’s residence in Taichung.
For about 10 days, the two teenagers were allegedly beaten and tortured before Liao escaped and went to the police for help.
When police arrived at Hsu’s residence with search warrants on Thursday, they found Lin’s body with burns and more than 100 cuts.
Liao said he and Lin were tortured by gang members, alleging they were beaten with a baseball bat, burned with cigarettes and a blow torch and shot at with a pellet gun.
In the postmortem examination yesterday, police said Lin likely died of asphyxiation, as objects were found in his nose and mouth.
Authorities, who are searching for other gang members, said the suspects will be charged with murder.
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,