Police are investigating an apparent suicide pact following the discovery of four bodies in Tainan’s Yenshui District (鹽水) on Wednesday.
Officials from the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office on Thursday examined the bodies of the three males and one female university student, as well as their belongings, after preliminary findings indicated they committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning by burning charcoal in an enclosed room.
Tainan Sinying Precinct Police Chief Chang Jung-hsin (張榮興) said that after the examination of the bodies and evidence, forensic pathologists yesterday performed autopsies to verify the cause of the death and determine whether there was any possibility of foul play.
Chang said police identified the four bodies as a 25-year-old man surnamed Wu (吳), his 22-year-old girlfriend surnamed Liu (劉), a cousin of Wu’s surnamed Kuo (郭), 31, and a friend of Kuo’s, a 35-year-old man.
“Although the bodies were swollen, their clothing had not been tampered with, they displayed no signs of trauma and it appeared that no foul play was involved,” Chang said.
They left suicide notes, which mentioned that the three men were embroiled in a dispute over debt which had led to them being sued, but that it was all due to a misunderstanding and they had had to borrow money from relatives and friends for living expenses for the past year, Chang said.
Chang said Liu left a note in which she apologized to her mother for her action and said she chose to commit suicide with her boyfriend because she could not bear him going to jail.
The two were found tied by a red string in reference to the Chinese “red string of fate” lovers’ suicide mythology.
Police investigators said it was likely the men decided to die together because of the lawsuit, and because they could not pay their debts and felt life was not worth living, while Liu decided to die alongside her boyfriend.
However, Liu’s parents believed their daughter had no reason to die and that she was “brainwashed” by the men, and had asked police to investigate further.
Local residents said the men had displayed some emotional disturbance at a temple during Taoist religious ceremonies, where certain rituals call for worshipers to be possessed by forces from the spiritual realm, resulting in agitated body motions and speaking in strange voices, and that they suspected this might have contributed to their deaths.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to