More than 190 e-mailed bomb threats received since September last year were traced and identified as coming from abroad, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said on Saturday.
The bureau said all of the threats were false alarms and no bombs have been found by the police to date.
The string of bomb threats that began last year continued on Saturday. Hsinchu County’s Leofoo Village Theme Park, New Taipei City’s National Taiwan Library and Taichung’s Education Bureau all received similar threats, but police did not find any suspicious objects.
Photo courtesy of Hsinchu county police
The culprits have threatened to detonate bombs in areas such as public transport stations with the aim of causing chaos, the bureau said.
The e-mailed threats have been sent using the names of politicians, celebrities or anime characters to hamper the investigation, it said.
The culprits have endangered public safety “by putting the public in fear of injury to life, body, or property,” the bureau said, citing the Criminal Code.
If convicted, the perpetrators could be sentenced to up to two years in jail, it said.
The bureau advised people who receive such threats to remain calm and notify the police right away.
Police said the Internet protocol addresses the threats were traced to were from other countries, including the US, Japan and Indonesia, but not China.
Those responsible for the threats could have used a virtual private network (VPN), police said.
Investigators would try to identify the suspects by filtering the words they have used, police said.
Meanwhile, the bureau said it is continuing to target Chinese national Zhang Haichuan (張海川) in a separate case.
Zhang, who previously studied in Taiwan, allegedly sent 235 threatening e-mails to public transport systems in Taiwan between September 2021 and Tuesday, it said.
The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office on June 14 last year asked Chinese law enforcement authorities to assist in solving the case.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching