A Kaohsiung resident was arrested yesterday for allegedly decapitating his sister in front of horrified neighbors.
The 54-year-old man, surnamed Lin (林), allegedly beheaded his sister with a kitchen knife outside their home after an argument, police said.
Lin and his mentally ill sister, 52, were unmarried and he had been taking care of her for years, police added.
“She was supposed to go to the hospital this morning and they quarreled when she refused. Lin then allegedly attacked her with a kitchen knife and severed her neck,” one officer said.
Local television reports quoted an eyewitness as saying the woman had knelt and pleaded for her life while neighbors screamed when they saw her severed head on the pavement.
The murder comes less than a week after Wang Ching-yu (王景玉) was sentenced to life imprisonment for beheading a four-year-old girl on a street in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) on March 28 last year.
Prosecutors had called the attack extremely cold-blooded and demanded the death penalty, but the Shilin District Court, which convicted Wang of intentional homicide of a child, decided against the death penalty because it said he was mentally ill.
The court said that Wang had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
Wang’s case sparked debate over the death penalty for child murder and the court’s sentencing drew protests. The prosecutors have said they are mulling an appeal.
A Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker has urged that the Criminal Code be amended to require mentally ill prisoners convicted of serious crimes to complete psychological therapy and be deemed mentally fit before the time they serve in prison can be counted toward their parole.
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
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