The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office today formally charged six people involved in a food poisoning incident at a Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) restaurant in March last year.
Six people died and 33 fell ill after ingesting bongkrek acid traced to the restaurant’s noodle dishes between March 19 and 24 at the Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store.
Prosecutors today said they have charged five people for contravening the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) and negligence causing death.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
The five are franchise owner Li Fang-hsuan (黎仿軒), store manager Wang Shun-te (王順德), substitute cook Ho Ching-fu (胡清富), head chef Chou Jih-hao (周日豪) and an intern surnamed Juan (阮).
Prosecutors said they are seeking a sentence of more than four years for Li, four years and two months for Ho, a heavy punishment for Chou, and “appropriate penalties” for Wang and Juan.
From March 14 to 17, temperatures in Xinyi District (信義) gradually rose before dropping again on March 18, meaning that the store’s air-conditioning system was turned off after business hours, prosecutors said.
Combined with cleaning procedures at the restaurant, which involved washing the kitchen floor with water that drained into a gutter, this created a hot and humid environment conducive to the type of bacteria that can produce bongkrek acid, prosecutors said.
On March 16, Chou, Juan and Ho left a basket of uneaten noodles unrefrigerated, which was then used over the subsequent days to make meals for customers, prosecutors said.
By March 19, when the noodles had been unrefrigerated for more than 63 hours, Ho used them in meals and mixed the contaminated noodles in with other ones, which were also left outside of the store’s refrigerator up until March 24, prosecutors said.
This resulted in 33 people over those few days falling ill, suffering from nausea, diarrhea and other injuries, leading to six deaths, prosecutors said.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
BREACH OF CONTRACT: The bus operators would seek compensation and have demanded that the manufacturer replace the chips with ones that meet regulations Two bus operators found to be using buses with China-made chips are to demand that the original manufacturers replace the systems and provide compensation for breach of contract, the Veterans Affairs Council said yesterday. Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Michelle Lin (林楚茵) yesterday said that Da Nan Bus Co and Shin-Shin Bus Co Ltd have fielded a total of 82 buses that are using Chinese chips. The bus models were made by Tron-E, while the systems provider was CYE Electronics, Lin said. Lin alleged that the buses were using chips manufactured by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon Co, which presents a national security risk if the
The National Immigration Agency has banned two Chinese from returning to Taiwan, after they published social media content it described as disrespectful to national sovereignty. The agency imposed a two-month ban on a Chinese man surnamed Liang (梁) and a permanent ban on a woman surnamed Yang (楊), an influencer with 23 million followers, in October last year and last week respectively. Minister of the Interior Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) yesterday said on the sidelines of a legislative meeting that Chinese visitors to Taiwan are required to comply with the rules and regulations governing their entry permits. The government has handled the ban and
RSS