The Kaohsiung branch of the High Court on Thursday reduced a Chinese man’s jail sentence from 26 years to 13 for allegedly ordering the killing of suspected pirates while captain of a Taiwanese vessel in 2012.
Wang Fengyu (汪峰裕) was arrested on Aug. 22, 2020, after the ship he was captain of at that time, the Seychelles-flagged Indian Star, docked at the Port of Kaohsiung. Kaohsiung prosecutors in October that year charged Wang with homicide and contraventions of the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act (槍砲彈藥刀械管制條例) for the alleged killing of four suspected pirates.
In January last year, the Kaohsiung District Court found Wang guilty of the charges and sentenced him to 26 years imprisonment.
Wang appealed the case, but the High Court in May last year upheld the sentence. He filed another appeal with the Supreme Court, which found discrepancies in the evidence presented, and it in August last year ordered the High Court’s Kaohsiung branch to re-examine the case for a retrial.
On Thursday, the High Court said the evidence only showed that Wang had ordered the killing of one suspected pirate, not four, and reduced his sentence to 13 years. The court said it also considered in its ruling the serious security issues related to the incident taking place at sea.
The ruling can still be appealed.
The incident occurred on Sept. 29, 2012, aboard the Kaohsiung-registered Ping Shin No. 101 while it was operating in the Indian Ocean off Somalia.
Wang was hired by a Kaohsiung company to serve as acting captain of the Ping Shin in 2011, court documents showed.
The vessel was operating about 595km southeast of Mogadishu when it, along with the Kaohsiung-registered Chun I No. 217 and two other unidentified fishing boats, were allegedly fired upon by a vessel crewed by four suspected pirates, court documents showed.
One of the fishing boats rammed the attacking vessel, which capsized, depositing the crew in the water. Wang allegedly instructed two Pakistani crew members he hired to shoot the men in the water, it showed.
The killings became public two years later in August 2014 when a 10-minute video clip of the shootings was circulated online, after a smartphone believed to have filmed the shootings was found in a taxi in Fiji and an anonymous person uploaded the video to YouTube.
In the clip, a man believed to be the captain is heard giving orders in Mandarin with a Chinese accent over a loudspeaker to the crew, as 40 rounds of live ammunition are fired.
The four men in the water are shot one by one, with the video showing the water turning red around them. No images of the shooters are seen.
Although Wang is Chinese and the crime occurred in the Indian Ocean, prosecutors said they were able to charge him in Taiwan because the shootings originated on a Taiwanese vessel.
In the indictment, Wang allegedly told prosecutors that he was involved in “tracking down pirates,” but said the shootings were in “self-defense.”
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off