Police yesterday questioned the driver of a Lamborghini LP560 after a fatal accident in Taipei’s Ziqiang Tunnel (自強隧道), which resulted in two deaths and three injuries, including the driver himself.
Yu Han-ning (游瀚甯), who was recovering in hospital, did not fully cooperate during questioning, law enforcement officials said, adding that they could not complete their police report, which is required before they can hand the case over to prosecutors.
Yu said he still felt dazed from his head injuries and refused to answer further questions, so police agreed to wait for him to finish treatment before completing their report, officials said.
Yu, 24, was driving the Lamborghini with his girlfriend Liu Yin-tsai (劉映采), who was sitting in the passenger’s seat, when he accelerated while traveling south inside the Ziqiang Tunnel at about 5am on Saturday.
Yu reportedly lost control and hit the tunnel wall, before ploughing into two stationary repair trucks.
Liu and a 49-year-old repair crew worker surnamed Chang (張) died.
Two other repair crew workers were injured in the accident. They were installing lighting inside the tunnel at the time.
Neither Yu nor the other workers were in a critical condition.
An injured repair crew worker surnamed Chao (趙) said: “We had no time to react. He was driving too fast... The driver had noticed us, because at about 300m before us, he turned into the right lane. We saw him hit the wall before he slammed into us.”
He was saddened by the death of his colleague, Chao added.
Traffic in the tunnel, which links Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) to the Neihu (內湖) and Dazhi (大直) districts, was halted for many hours.
Yu would be prosecuted as he was driving at more than 150km per hour at the time, officials said.
News reports said that Yu’s parents run the “Spiritual Ocean International Group” (心靈海國際教育集團), which provides spiritual guidance and self-empowerment courses and has more than 300,000 members in China.
The Lamborghini is worth an estimated NT$15 million (US$491,803).
Yu had rented it from a car dealership for NT$50,000 per week and it would cost NT$5 million to repair, reports said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift