Taoyuan prosecutors on Friday charged a man with shooting and killing his partner during a nighttime hunt, after allegedly mistaking her for a wild boar.
He was charged with negligence resulting in death, as well as contravening the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act (槍砲彈藥刀械管制條例), as the ammunition and two modified rifles confiscated from him were not registered.
The incident took place on Wednesday night in the mountain forests of Miaoli County’s Zaociao Township (造橋), where the suspect, surnamed Chen (陳), 61, said he was hunting game with the victim, surnamed Lin (林), 61, and his cousin.
Lin was reportedly in a common-law relationship with Chen.
After traveling from Taoyuan, the party roamed about in the dark along a forest trail, with Chen and his cousin each carrying a modified rifle, Chen said.
“We were using flashlights to look for wild animals... Then at a distance, I thought I saw glowing eyes reflecting the light from my flashlight,” prosecutors quoted Chen as saying. “So I took aim and fired one shot with the rifle, thinking it was a wild boar, but my cousin yelled at me: ‘You shot someone! Come over here quickly!’ Then we saw [Lin] was bleeding with a shot just above her right eye.”
The two men rushed her to a local hospital, but she was pronounced dead the next day, and police launched an investigation.
Police said they confiscated the modified rifles, which take metal pellets as bullets, more than 100 metal pellet balls, one modified nail gun capable of long-range fire and 45 sharpened pieces of metal for the nail gun, all of which were unregistered and were found in the car that was used for the hunting trip.
Chen and his cousin are Amis, and the case has renewed debate over Aborigines’ rights to practice their hunting traditions, the need to protect Taiwan’s wildlife and the use of illegal or unregistered firearms by hunters, as well as what is perceived to be lax control of the underground trade in game meat.
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