A man who was arrested in November last year for attempting to climb onto a China Airlines airplane as it prepared to take off at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport has been charged with contravening the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法), prosecutors said yesterday.
The man was previously reported to be from Belarus, but prosecutors said that they have yet to ascertain his nationality.
He has not spoken to law enforcement officers since his arrest and remains uncooperative, despite efforts to communicate with him in several languages, the Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office said.
The man had no form of identification on him when he was arrested on Nov. 2 last year while attempting to climb onto the landing gear of the China Airlines aircraft, which was about to depart for Palau, prosecutors said.
In the dramatic incident, the man was spotted darting out of the bushes on the perimeter of the airport and running to the undercarriage of the Boeing 737-800 as it taxied toward the runway for takeoff.
The pilot of an Asiana Airlines airplane, which was behind the China Airlines aircraft, reported seeing the man, who was subdued by airport security, Taoyuan International Airport Corp said.
The man refused to speak to police and had no identification on him, but because a Bible and other books found in his backpack were in Russian, officers called for a Russian interpreter to try to communicate with him.
However, the interpreter, a priest from an Orthodox Church, was also unsuccessful in eliciting any response from the man, prosecutors said.
During the investigation, prosecutors said that the only information they managed to obtain was that the man wanted to go to Palau, which he indicated by means of a drawing.
The man’s case is to be heard by the Taoyuan District Court, prosecutors said.
If found guilty, he could face a maximum of three years in prison and/or a fine of up to NT$90,000, they said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods