New Taipei City police had three suspects in custody yesterday after they handed themselves in on Saturday for allegedly beating gang member Chen Chih-chiang (陳智強) to death, police officials said.
Accompanied by a lawyer, the three suspects headed to a New Taipei City police station on Saturday to report the killing of Chen, 35, and said that his body was in a metal shack in the city’s Yinnge District (鶯歌), officials said.
Prosecutors said they have filed murder charges against Lee Hao (李灝), Chen Po-an (陳柏安), and Lee Chih-hao (李志豪), who are all 25 and allegedly involved with gangs.
Chen’s friends said that he was taken by force from a car park in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) and reported it to police on Saturday.
The three suspects said they had quarreled with Chen a few months ago and were seeking revenge, so they waited for their chance and kidnapped him, the officials said.
They said they were just roughing Chen up with wooden clubs and metal rods “to teach him a lesson,” but got carried away and beat him to death.
When police found his body, it was covered in blood and bruises, and his skull was cracked, officials said.
Background checks found that Chen was the boss of a local chapter of the Bamboo Union, which is active in the Nangang and Sijhih (汐止) districts, where the organized crime syndicate is involved in loan sharking, debt collection and extortion, officials said.
Chen had been convicted for physical assault and extortion, and investigated for gang-related activity.
In one incident, Chen and 20 gang members smashed up an Internet cafe because the proprietor would not pay protection money and had refused Chen’s request for a stake in the business.
Investigations are ongoing, officials said, adding that, to prevent further gang violence yesterday, there was a heavy police presence at the mourning hall set up by Chen’s family.
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