Former President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) — well acquainted with shooting incidents — issued advice to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday, asking it not to overplay last month’s -election-eve mishap.
In the latest statement issued by his office, Chen said he believed there were a number of factors behind the opposition party’s disappointing showing at the polls and that the shooting of Sean Lien (連勝文), one of former vice president Lien Chan’s (連戰) sons, was only one of them.
“It is neither fair nor objective to simplify [the matter] and say that the bullet on Nov. 26 impacted the election results,” his statement said. “There are many other reasons why the DPP failed to live up to expectations in the special municipality elections.”
Chen, who was shot alongside then-vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) during election-eve campaigning in Tainan in 2004, cited an earlier poll taken by the DPP following the shooting and said that only 2.4 percent of voters said at the time the incident swayed their ballot. Of that number, 1.3 percent voted for his opponent, while 1.1 percent voted for the DPP.
“Who will believe that the incident last month impacted election results more than the shooting in 2004? Lu and I were vice presidential and presidential candidates at the time, while Sean Lien wasn’t even a participant in the special municipality polls,” he said. “[Nobody] should be using double -standards to compare the two -election-eve shootings.”
Chen’s statement was, according to officials at his office, written on Dec. 4, two days after he was transferred to Taipei Prison to begin serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence after being convicted on two separate corruption charges. News and some of the former president’s writings are ferried in and out of the prison through members of his staff, the office said.
The latest release comes at a time when both the DPP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) are bitterly disputing whether sympathy votes cast after the shooting incident on Nov. 26 altered election results, especially in a close contest for the Greater Taichung mayoralty.
The DPP has already decided to file lawsuits against several KMT politicians, accusing them of using controversial remarks that night to manipulate the incident in the KMT’s favor.
DPP lawmakers claim that based on their calculations, DPP candidates would have been in close contests in Sinbei and Taipei cities if it weren’t for the shooting. Instead, DPP candidates in the two races lost by larger-than-expected margins.
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS