The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) jumped into action yesterday, when Philippine media outlets reported that three people found dead in central Luzon in the Philippines were Taiwanese. The reports later turned out to be false.
“We were notified by the Philippine police that as there were no identity documents on the bodies, it was hard to determine the authenticity of media reports that the three were Taiwanese citizens,” ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said early yesterday, adding that ministry officials planned to travel to Philippine province to gain a better understanding of the case from local police.
Wang said a Ministry of Justice-affiliated secretary based in the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in the Philippines had arrived in the town of Bacolor, in the Pampanga Province of Luzon, yesterday afternoon to join up with local police to examine relevant documents.
Judging from the appearances of the three deceased, the Philippine police assumed that they were Asian, but have yet to be able to determine whether they were Taiwanese, Wang said.
“The Philippine police have repeatedly stressed that they have never declared the nationality of the victims and that all media reports are based on nothing but pure speculation,” Wang said.
According to Philippine media outlets, the three suspected Taiwanese, along with another believed to be Chinese, were found dead in two locations in Pampanga Province.
The ministry has asked the TECO in the Philippines to maintain close contact with police to stay abreast of the progress of the investigation.
ABS-CBN News reported that a farmer found the three bodies — one woman and two men — near a sugar cane farm at about 6:30am on Tuesday, and gave their ages as between 30 and 35.
The news report did not say why it concluded that the dead were Taiwanese.
At about 9am on Tuesday, police checked an abandoned sports utility vehicle in the province and found the fourth man’s body with multiple stab wounds.
If a drugs angle is confirmed, it will mean that extrajudicial killings for perceived drug offenses have expanded to include foreigners.
Since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office on June 30, he has waged a rigorous crackdown on drugs.
Late last night, MOFA announced that Philippine police confirmed that the three bodies belonged to South Korean nationals and another body found in the abandoned vehicle with stab wounds was Chinese.
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