Police raided a house in Kaohsiung yesterday morning and arrested a man suspected of involvement with a bank hold-up on Friday, when a bank clerk was threatened with a gun and NT$900,000 (US$27,468) in cash was stolen.
Kaohsiung City Police Department officials said they are questioning Shih Yung-hsiang (施永祥), 30, over the heist at the CTBC Bank in the city’s Nanzih District (楠梓).
At Shih’s house, an air pistol and NT$420,000 in cash were recovered, along with other evidence, Nanzih Police Precinct investigation unit chief Lin Keng-yu (林耕宇) said.
Shih said he had carried out the robbery because he had gambling debts of more than NT$1 million, police said.
Shih said he had used the money to pay some of his debts and planned to use the remaining NT$420,000 to pay other creditors.
Shih worked as a taxi driver, and lives with his wife and two children, police said, adding that officers waited until his wife went out before storming his residence and arresting him.
Police said Shih often played tian jiu pai (天九牌) — a Chinese domino game usually involving gambling that is popular in Taiwan, Hong Kong and southern China.
Shih said he had lost a lot of money playing the game, so he decided to rob a local bank, police said.
Wearing a surgical mask, Shih went to the bank and waited until there were no other customers and the security guard went outside, then made his move, police said, citing surveillance camera footage.
Shih walked to the lone female bank clerk holding up the air pistol, and shouted: “This is a robbery. Hand over the money,” police said.
After grabbing the cash from the clerk, Shih ran away, with a security guard hesitating to stop him for fear of being shot, police said.
After examining the video footage, police officers said they recognized Shih, who has prior criminal convictions.
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