Police on Friday confiscated more than 100 guns and ammunition from an alleged firearms smuggling ring worth an estimated NT$40 million (US$1.35 million) on the black market, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said yesterday.
The 109 guns and 12,378 bullets had been transported from Hong Kong to Taiwan by sea in a shipping container, bureau officials told a news conference.
Six suspects were arrested, including a 24-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳), they said.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
When customs officers inspected shipping containers at the Port of Keelung on April 29, they suspected that a container from Hong Kong was carrying contraband items, bureau Deputy Director Liao Tsung-shan (廖宗山) said.
The officers immediately reported their suspicions to the police, Liao said, adding that the bureau then formed a task force to investigate.
The task force discovered that the items in the container were on Friday sent to a warehouse in New Taipei City’s Sansia District (三峽) and raided the warehouse, seizing a variety of firearms and arresting the six people, he said.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
Included in the seizure were three powerful US-made Bushmaster rifles that are able to fire 700 to 900 shots a minute and can hit targets up to 1km away, local media reported.
Chen said he was told by his employer to move two large molding machines into the warehouse and had no idea that there were weapons inside them, police said, adding that he was expecting to be paid more than NT$100,000 for doing so.
The other five people arrested said they were only in the warehouse to help move the machinery.
Police said they believe Chen is not the mastermind of the smuggling operation, adding that they would continue their investigation to find out who is responsible.
Minister of the Interior Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) said the ministry is determined to root out weapons trafficking and keep the nation safe.
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