Tainan police yesterday captured a wanted criminal after a 10-hour chase that ended on the roof of a construction site.
Police launched a massive search after Yang Chen-hsun (楊政勳) earlier in the day resisted arrest and grabbed a police officer’s handgun before fleeing, the Tainan City Police Department said in a press release.
Yang was armed and dangerous, and evaded police by hiding in a neighborhood in Tainan’s North District (北區), it said.
Yang was known to be violent, and had a string of convictions for sexual assault, narcotics offenses, illegal firearms possession and involvement in organized crime, police said.
Yang had resisted arrest before, when police closed in on him in April. He escaped by ramming his motorcycle into four officers, injuring them.
A SWAT team and other police units comprising more than 100 officers yesterday tracked down Yang, Tainan City Fifth Police Precinct Deputy Chief Hsieh Cheng-fu (謝承甫) said.
News footage showed police in combat gear and wearing flak jackets, with some carrying shields, going through houses in a cordoned-off neighborhood in their search for Yang.
“It was a dangerous situation and a high level of precaution was needed, because the handgun he wrestled off the officer had 11 bullets in the magazine,” Hsieh said.
The chase began at about 6am when a police officer spotted Yang and his girlfriend in a car when the two stopped at a breakfast shop, police said.
Yang slowed down his car as though he would cooperate when the officer ordered him to stop, but he then jumped on the officer and took his handgun from its holster, they said.
Yang ran into an alley and hid in an apartment that was unoccupied at the time, but neighbors who had witnessed the incident called the police to report Yang’s whereabouts, they added.
Yang continued to move through the area, remaining hidden for the rest of the morning and afternoon, police said.
As police surrounded the neighborhood, Yang was seen heading toward a construction site, where police officers backed by a SWAT team found him hiding under a tarp on the building’s roof, they said.
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
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
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