Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) officials yesterday said they have arrested nine people on suspicion of human trafficking, and rescued nine Taiwanese.
The suspects are being accused of luring Taiwanese to Cambodia with lucrative job offers, before forcing them to work in their fraud operations.
The criminal ring was allegedly led by Lee Chen-hao (李振豪), who is suspected of being a boss of a Taipei chapter of the Bamboo Union triad, the officials said.
Photo: Chiu Chun-fu, Taipei Times
Lee and two men working for him have been placed under judicial detention pending further investigation, they said.
The CIB, with support from the National Police Agency, on Tuesday raided a business run by alleged members of the gang on Linsen N Road in Taipei and detained six suspected members of the ring.
Police also found modified handguns, bullets, computers, money ledgers, employment contracts and other documents linking the suspects to the trafficking operation.
Lee and other members of the ring are facing charges of fraud, illegal confinement and organized crime, CIB officials said.
The CIB’s investigation of the criminal ring began in May, when it received a call from a person being held hostage by the criminals. Police raided a hotel in Taipei and found three people confined to a room waiting to be transported to Cambodia.
Police at the time arrested three suspects, led by a man surnamed Lin (林), who allegedly worked with Lee in the human trafficking operation.
A follow-up investigation led to this week’s arrests, while police are cooperating with Cambodian authorities to track down other Taiwanese who might be linked to the case.
“Lee in November last year linked up with ‘snakeheads’ in Cambodia to set up conduits for human trafficking. He and members of his gang then put advertisements on social media platforms, offering up to NT$50,000 to NT$60,000 a month to work in Cambodia,” the CIB said.
The jobs offered included working in casinos, lending money and acting in adult films, it said.
However, the job applicants were confined to hotel rooms and had their identification cards confiscated before being forced to sign employment contracts. They were then taken to Cambodia, where local criminals and colluding Taiwanese took them to a place where they were forced to work in a telecom scam headed by Taiwanese, it said.
Victims who refused to cooperate were beaten and even tortured with electricity, the CIB said.
The profits generated by the criminal operation were split evenly between the Taiwanese and Cambodian groups, it said.
Eighty-two Taiwanese have been taken to Cambodia this way and nine have been rescued so far, the CIB said, adding that efforts are ongoing to find and repatriate the remaining victims.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS