A former air force captain has been arrested on charges of colluding with Chinese intelligence operatives, the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office said on Monday.
Chen Kuo-wei (陳國瑋) was turned over to the office for alleged violations of the National Intelligence Services Act (國家情報工作法), it said, adding that the Taiwan High Court ruled to detain him incommunicado.
Senior Ministry of National Defense officials said Chen might have colluded with Chinese intelligence after his failed attempt to conduct business in China.
Chen, 40, retired as a captain in the air force’s logistics and maintenance division 15 years ago and has since been traveling to Shanghai to try to start his own business, they said.
While Chen had no access to classified materials or intelligence during his time in the air force, most of his friends in the military are now colonels or lieutenant colonels, making him a target for Chinese intelligence, the ministry said.
It said Chen was asked by the Chinese to persuade his contacts in the military to supply information and it was during such an attempt that he came in contact with a person working in the Military Intelligence Bureau.
The person reported the incident to his superiors, because he was concerned that Chen’s overtures might be an attempt to obtain military information and build an intelligence network in Taiwan for the Chinese, the ministry said.
The bureau and prosecutors monitored Chen’s activities for some time and, deciding that they had collected enough information on Chen to build a case, obtained permission to detain him on Sunday when he returned to Taiwan, allegedly to collect information from his sources, the ministry said.
The bureau declined to comment on whether Chen had succeeded in forming an intelligence network in the military, saying that the case has been turned over to the prosecutors’ office for investigation.
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,