The Judicial Yuan’s Public Functionary Disciplinary Sanction Commission has dismissed five Yilan County police officers who were found guilty of being involved in illegal logging operations and sentenced one officer to 12 years in prison, while the other four received sentences of between one and five years.
The commission convened last week to review the case, after the High Court found the five police officers guilty in March.
The commission was tasked with handing out punishments to the five officers, as the police force is overseen by the government.
The five were convicted of violating the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例) in 2012. They were found to have colluded with poaching gangs over the illegal logging of Taiwan cypress, Taiwan red cedar and other trees. The wood of such trees can fetch high prices on the black market.
Two of the five, surnamed Tsai (蔡) and Kao (高), were serving in Yilan County police precincts, while the other three, surnamed Wang (王), Wu (吳) and Tsai (蔡) were serving in the National Police Agency’s forest and nature conservation police unit — known as the “forest police.”
According to official information, the main task of the unit is “to support forest patrolmen to preserve and protect the environment and all historic monuments in all the forests in Taiwan.”
“The three forest police in the case were tasked with protecting forests and helping to preserve mountain ecosystems. It was a twisted, cynical decision for them to ravage forests and mountain ecosystems. It amounted to asking the fox to guard the henhouse,” a committee member who declined to be named said.
The case stemmed from August 2012, after Typhoon Saola swept through Taiwan’s northern regions, which resulted in landslides and devastation to forests in the mountains of Yilan County and neighboring areas.
The five police officers colluded with tree poaching gangs, which are known colloquially as “mountain rats,” by providing road access information, leading the gangs to preserved forest areas, assisting them in cutting down trees, transporting logs down mountain roads and leaking patrol details of other forest police units so that they could evade inspections.
Investigations revealed the police officers received bribes, and commissions ranging from 1 to 5 percent of all sales of the illegally harvested wood.
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