The Control Yuan on Tuesday reprimanded the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office for neglecting to crack down on one of its own prosecutors who has allegedly been involved in conspiracy to commit murder, interference with police duties and other criminal activities.
In a report published by the Control Yuan, the Kaohsiung Police Department was also reprimanded for failing to report the interference by prosecutor Yen Han-wen (顏漢文) on disputes between law enforcement officials and members of the public from 2011 to 2013.
The probe was conducted by Control Yuan member Kao Feng-hsien (高鳳仙), who documented the criminal cases Yen was involved in, including a conviction last year on a 2011 murder plot against the abbot of Jinshan Temple (金山寺) in Kaohsiung.
In August last year, a district court found Yen guilty of hiring a man to run down the abbot with a car in an attempt to make the incident look like an accident and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. The court said that Yen was trying to take over the temple’s property and its lucrative funeral service business.
The Control Yuan’s report said that in a separate incident, Yen and an accomplice bought three handguns for a hired assassin to kill the abbot, but the abbot escaped with bullet wounds to his left arm.
Citing several other illegal activities in the report, Kao said, “Yen is the most violent prosecutor in our nation’s history.”
Kao said the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office had already received complaints of Yen’s interference with police work in 1999, but did not pursue the allegations and covered up the complaints by superficial investigations, stating “there was no evidence of illegal activity.”
From 2011 to 2013, Yen used his authority as a prosecutor to order police officials and inspectors at Kaohsiung precincts to stop investigating a number of drunk driving and public disorder cases, Kao said.
“Police officers and inspectors failed to report Yen’s interference to their respective government ethics offices. Therefore, the Kaohsiung Police Department has been negligent in carrying out its supervisory responsibilities,” Kao said.
The reports said that from 1990 to 2011, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office gave Yen the highest rating in its year-end performance evaluation 13 times.
“The prosecutors’ office responsible for Yen either did not know of his criminal activities, or chose not to do anything about it. There was clear dereliction of its supervisory duties,” Kao said, as the reprimands were announced.
The report on Yen came after the release of survey results on Monday, showing that a record-high 84.6 percent of respondents do not trust the objectivity and fairness of judges and 76.5 percent of respondents do not trust the objectivity and fairness of prosecutors.
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