Prosecutors probing New Party members over alleged espionage activities for China are now focusing on the possible leaking of classified information about the nation’s top military special operations unit, according to a report in the Chinese-language United Daily News.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office is looking into allegations that New Party Youth Corps member Lin Ming-cheng (林明正) passed on personal information and contact details of soldiers in the Army Aviation and Special Forces Command’s secretive Airborne Special Service Company (高空特種勤務中隊), also known as the “Liang Shan Special Operations Company” (涼山特勤隊) to former Chinese student Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭), who has been convicted of doing intelligence work for China, the newspaper said yesterday.
The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s national security branch summoned a Liang Shan company officer for questioning, the report said, adding that he had admitted to being a friend of Lin.
The officer said he had provided names and contact information of fellow company members at dinner gatherings, the report said.
The officer added Lin as a friend on Facebook and thought it was just normal social interaction to talk about fellow service members, the newspaper said, adding that he regretted it after learning that Lin was accused of collecting classified materials on Taiwan’s armed forces for Zhou.
Prosecutors were quoted by media as saying they believed Zhou was not only trying to obtain names and contact details, but was trying to obtain top secret information on the Liang Shan company’s deployment and special missions.
Investigators debriefed the officer to find out the extent of the leaks, but said he insisted that he had only provided names and details, and had not passed any classified military information to Lin.
Known as Taiwan’s most secretive military unit — equivalent to the US Navy’s elite Sea, Air and Land teams, also known as Navy SEALs — the Liang Shan company is reportedly capable of covert commando strike operations and is based at Pingtung County’s Liangshan (涼山).
If information about the unit were to leak out, it would constitute a serious national security breach, as the unit is responsible for counterterrorism and other special combat missions over and above the regular armed forces.
Prosecutors have said that Zhou targeted the Liang Shan company, as the unit is reportedly trained as Taiwan’s stealth “decapitation” commandos tasked with striking enemy leaders in times of war, but this has never been clarified by top military brass.
According to investigators, Lin served as secretary-general of the “Association of New Chinese Sons and Daughters” (新中華兒女協會) in 2014 when he became acquainted with Zhou and they had frequent interactions about their aligned political views.
Later, Zhou began to request information about Lin’s friends and members of his social circle who were serving in Taiwan’s armed forces, investigators said.
Lin allegedly passed information on five military officers to Zhou, the highest ranked of whom was a colonel, but also including military cadets, which Zhou contacted in hopes of recruiting them to form a spy network, investigators said.
Lin, New Party spokesman Wang Ping-chung (王炳忠) and fellow party Youth Corps members Hou Han-ting (侯漢廷) and Chen Ssu-chun (陳斯俊) were on Dec. 19 summoned for questioning in connection with Zhou’s conviction for espionage in violation of the National Security Act (國家安全法).
Prosecutors reportedly uncovered e-mail correspondence between Zhou and the four from confiscated computers and mobile phones, which they said showed that Zhou had promised to fund pro-China organizations and networks, including paying NT$5 million (US$169,359) to the “Association of New Chinese Sons and Daughters.”
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that
RSS