The campaign office of New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, yesterday filed a police report, accusing Vice President William Lai (賴清德) of spreading misinformation about a kindergarten drugging controversy.
The office accused Lai, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate, and a spokesperson from Lai’s campaign office, Tai Wei-shan (戴瑋姍), of wrongly claiming — before an investigation has been completed — that students at a kindergarten in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋) were sedated.
Lai’s camp created unnecessary panic and might have contravened the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), said Liu Tsai-wei (柳采葳), a spokeswoman for Hou’s campaign office.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
On Wednesday last week, Tai wrote on social media that children were given phenobarbital and test results showed the drug in their urine, Liu said.
Tai intentionally ignored that the result was negative, despite a number being given for the concentration level, Liu said.
She misled the public by implying that there should be no trace in the results, Liu said, adding that Taiwan FactCheck Center classified Tai’s remarks as “disinformation.”
Lai and Tai should be imprisoned for three days, as the law stipulates, she said, adding that Lai should apologize to the public and Tai should resign.
Separately, the DPP accused the Hou administration of dragging its feet in holding the kindergarten to account after the test results were released on June 5.
Hou and the KMT have dismissed the DPP’s accusations, accusing the ruling party of spreading rumors to score political points ahead of the presidential election next year.
The New Taipei City Government on Tuesday said that no phenobarbitals were detected in the students’ blood samples, citing the results of mass spectrometry tests.
Lai’s campaign office yesterday said that some parents of students at the kindergarten reported symptoms of drug withdrawal in their children and that Hou responded to the reports too slowly.
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