Airports, harbors and major utility depots are the focus of enhanced security measures following recent power outages and a fire at a power facility.
The National Police Agency (NPA) has mandated that local law enforcement agencies enhance security and armed patrols at important infrastructure sites and transportation hubs, conducting checks on suspicious individuals and posting guards at entrances and exits, it said.
These areas include airports, seaports, railway stations, reservoirs, oil and gas depots, power plants and substations, as well as other sites of national security importance, NPA Director-General Chen Ja-chin (陳家欽) said on Friday.
Photo courtesy of National Police Agency via CNA
The Aviation Police Bureau on Tuesday said it arrested two temporary workers suspected of causing a power outage in Terminal 2 of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport on Friday last week, allegedly by cutting cables that power parts of the building.
On March 3, about 5.49 million households lost power in one of the nation’s largest power outages since 2017 after a worker at Kaohsiung’s Hsinta Power Plant (興達電廠) caused a malfunction by flipping the wrong switch.
On Monday last week, a fire broke out at Hsin Tao Power Corp (新桃電力) in Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西) and at a Carrefour logistics center in Taoyuan.
Regarding the Taoyuan airport incident, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee last week that he was concerned that one of the workers had been released from prison, but had been allowed to freely walk about the airport.
Lin said that negligence and mismanagement by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and Taoyuan International Airport Corp caused the incident.
DPP Legislator Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑) said he found it strange that the suspects would steal electric cables that had been installed, but left cables lying on the ground untouched.
“It is possible that they deliberately caused the power outage so that the public would lose faith in the government. National security officials should be involved in the investigation of the incident to ascertain whether the perpetrators were sent by China,” he said.
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