Taitung Prosecutor Wu Tsung-hsian (吳宗憲) said yesterday that a 13-year-old girl arrested for the suspected use of Ecstasy had mistaken him for a drug user and told him how she and her friends hid their pills.
"She thought that I was also an Ecstasy user who had been arrested by the police and she became very talkative," Wu said.
"I asked her how they hid their pills to avoid being caught. She said that at home they usually hid them inside their air conditioners. When they went out, they hid them in their shoes."
Wu said that he had been surprised to find a 13-year-old girl who had been arrested on suspicion of using Ecstasy when he arrived at the police station yesterday.
He said the conversation occurred when he asked her why she took the drug.
The Taitung County Police Department arrested four suspected Ecstasy users, including the girl, at a night club in Taitung City Thursday night and took them to the station for urine tests for drugs as well as blood tests for HIV.
They were being held at the police station before being transferred to the Taitung District Prosecutors' Office for further investigation when Wu arrived at the station yesterday morning.
Police said the four, one male and three females, are all under 18 and all tested positive for Ecstasy. The 13-year-old girl is the youngest of the group. The boy is 17 years old, and the other two girls are 15 and 16 years old.
Wu said that the four minors live together in Taitung, though he did not elaborate.
He also said he suspects that the 17-year-old boy might have introduced the girls to drug use as a means of controlling them. He added that perhaps the boy had raped the girls, though he gave no explanation for that comment.
Because they are minors, the four can only be tried in a juvenile court and cannot be subject to custodial sentences.
Wu said that after speaking to the girl, he applied for a warrant to search the four youths' apartment. Eight Ecstasy pills were found inside an air conditioner in the home.
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