Taoyuan Prison officials yesterday said they foiled a jailbreak attempt by a suspect.
According to a statement released by the prison, the man has been detained since May on charges related to a robbery case and has been awaiting trial.
“The detainee made an appointment to see a doctor at the prison’s medical ward yesterday morning, saying he was not feeling well. At about 11:53am, he climbed up the medical ward’s ceiling, broke the skylight panel and climbed up to the roof,” prison chief secretary Ko Shu-yu (柯書宇) said.
Security personnel were alerted. They called for support when the man reached the roof and started walking toward a guard tower, Ko said.
People passing by the prison, including a judge who was going to a meeting there, saw the man when he reached the tower’s outer wall, which is surrounded by barriers and barbed wire, and got stuck.
The suspect was bleeding due to cuts from the barbed wire, the prison statement said, adding that security personnel and local police arrived at the scene and surrounded the tower inside and outside the prison.
Prison officials talked to the man as he tried to jump off the wall, which is 5m high, Ko said.
They tried to dissuade the man from taking any action that might result in serious injury, Ko said.
The man later agreed and surrendered, and prison staff escorted him to the medical ward to treat his wounds, Ko said.
He was taken to a hospital in Taoyuan for further treatment and examination.
The prison will conduct an investigation to find out if the man had made plans to escape, Ko said.
It would reinforce the medical ward’s ceiling and skylight panels to prevent similar incidents, Ko 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:
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