Retired lieutenant general Abe Lin (林勤經), who has been charged with leaking classified information to a local arms company, has also been placed on the nation’s most-wanted list, the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.
Lin, who once headed the Ministry of National Defense’s Evaluation Planning Department, retired in July 2007 and soon relocated to the US.
He was also a key figure in the Po Sheng Program — an integrated Taiwan-US Pacific Command joint military strike platform for sharing information — from which Lin is suspected of leaking classified information, the office said.
Lin is accused of helping U&U Engineering win a key maintenance contract by passing on to company chairman Cheng Tung (鄭統) information about the Indigenous Defensive Fighter (IDF) jets, which were part of the Po Sheng Program.
U&U was able to obtain a technology transfer from a US company before it won sole agency rights to maintain part of the jets’ system.
Lin has been charged with violating the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法).
In 2008, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office launched an investigation and questioned Cheng, who reportedly said that he had discussed the Po Sheng procurement process with Lin several times, but denied that Lin had leaked to him any classified information.
The prosecutors’ office said the retired general would remain on the most-wanted list for 25 years — until July 2039.
Lin lives in San Diego, California, and local media reports say that he teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) recently said that Abe Lin became a US citizen after he retired, suggesting that he might have obtained a US green card during the time he was still on active-duty.
“It is absurd,” Lin Yu-fang said.
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