The nation’s intelligence/security agencies were likely involved in the 1980 murders of democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) mother and six-year-old twin daughters, but the destruction of key evidence has made it hard to draw firm conclusions, the Transitional Justice Commission said yesterday, as it released a report of its investigation into the murders.
Friday next week marks the 40th anniversary of the murders, an attack that left Lin’s then-nine-year-old daughter severely wounded.
At a news conference at the National Human Rights Museum, the commission said that National Security Bureau (NSB) files showed that a suspect in the murders made a call from a telephone inside the Lin home to a restaurant at the time of the attack.
A team investigating the murders had hoped to analyze surveillance data from the time, but a bureau document dated March 10, 1980, said that telephone surveillance recordings from Feb. 28 had been “flushed,” the commission said in its report.
Although the Criminal Investigation Bureau had requested to meet with those involved in the surveillance of Lin’s house, the NSB said such a meeting would be limited to the investigative team’s chief and deputy chief for reasons of confidentiality, the report said.
The report said there were references to the telephone call in meeting records from Feb. 29 and March 8, 1980.
When asked at the time why the recordings had been erased, the NSB said the telephone conversation had been a fragment and it did not know that the murders had occurred.
An investigation into the murders had been “severely obstructed,” and the possibility of the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s involvement could not be ruled out, the report said.
Commission member Greg Yo (尤伯祥) said there were three possibilities why the recording had been destroyed.
One was that intelligence agencies had directed the attack or knew it would happen beforehand and allowed it to happen, then erased the evidence; the second was that the intelligence agencies did not know about the attack until after afterwards, but destroyed the tapes due to their ties to the murderer or because the tapes contained information that would have a negative impact on them or the government; and the third was that the tapes were destroyed by accident, he said.
The NSB’s claim that it did not know about the murders was unbelievable, because the director learned about the attack the day it happened, he added.
Surveillance personnel also would have found out about the incident when a Lin family friend, Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇), arrived at the house and called for help, Yo said.
A thorough investigation by the government into surveillance files related to Lin is needed and the files need to be released, as the commission’s investigation, which had limited resources and time, should not be the end of the investigation, he said.
The commission had sought to interview Lin and his family members, but they declined, saying they did not want to bring up the past, commission member Yeh Hung-ling (葉虹靈) said.
The files the commission collected show previous governments not only did not do a good job investigating the case, but might have caused the Lin family additional harm, Yo said.
The commission respects the Lin family’s unwillingness to trust another government investigation or to be involved with one, he said.
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