The Military High Court yesterday sentenced General Lo Hsien-che (羅賢哲), former head of communications and electronic information at army command headquarters, to life in prison for providing military secrets to China.
The court said Lo violated Article 17 of the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces, which stipulates “conducting intelligence actions for the enemy leads to [the] death sentence or life imprisonment.”
The court said that given that Lo admitted to his actions during the investigation and had returned the money he received from China, the court reduced his sentence to life imprisonment.
The court said Lo on five occasions delivered classified information to Beijing and received payments that may have totaled US$1 million since 2004.
The court said Lo could appeal the ruling with the Military Supreme Court.
Lo’s case was the nation’s biggest espionage case in 50 years.
Lo, who was arrested in January, was stationed in Thailand between 2002 and 2005. He is believed to have been recruited by Chinese agents in a “honey trap” operation in 2004 and thereafter collected military secrets and delivered classified information to Beijing.
Lo’s indictment document said he frequented prostitutes when he was in Thailand and that Chinese agents blackmailed him after they had filmed him.
Fearing the scandal would hurt his military career, Lo began spying for Beijing, it said.
The military and the court have not commented on whether the 51-year-old one-star general had had access to a joint Taiwan-US military communications project, called Po Sheng (“Broad Victory”), and whether he had leaked confidential information about the project.
The military also denied local media reports claiming that Lo sold a scrambler used by Taiwan’s intelligence services to China during his posting in Thailand.
The Chinese-language China Times had reported that investigators found that Lo reported the loss of a scrambler while posted in Thailand, leading the paper to conclude: “It is almost certain that Lo ‘sold’ the scrambler to communist China for a high price.”
The paper said China’s possession of such a device would pose a grave threat to national security.
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