Prosecutors on Friday requested that a Chinese immigrant be detained incommunicado on suspicion of leading dozens of people on a trip to China and telling them to support certain political parties.
The suspect, 49-year-old Tsai Zhan-ping (蔡占萍), moved to Taiwan 20 years ago from China’s Jiangsu Province for marriage.
Last year she was named a winner of the eighth “Dream Building Project for New Residents and their Children” award by the National Immigration Agency for her dedication to caring for her hearing-impaired son.
Photo: Reuters
Tsai also founded and serves as president of the Greater Kaohsiung Cross-Strait Economic and Cultural Promotion Association.
Investigators believe that Tsai, at the instruction of officers handling Taiwan affairs in the Jiangsu provincial government, led more than 30 people on a trip to Nantong City, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office said.
Some of the people were Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) employees or assistants of city councilors, it said.
The trip was mostly paid for by Nantong City, including a banquet hosted by the Taiwan affairs officials, who shared “united front” propaganda, it said.
After returning, Tsai through a group chat encouraged the participants to support certain candidates and political parties, it added.
Seventeen people were brought in for questioning on Thursday, the office said.
As Tsai was uncooperative, prosecutors said they believe she poses a collusion or flight risk and applied with a court for her to be detained incommunicado.
The other 16 suspects and witnesses were released after questioning, the office added.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week