Skeletal remains found earlier this month in Taroko National Park have been identified as those of a foreign tourist who went missing with his wife after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Hualien on April 3 last year.
According to police statements at the time, the man, Sim Hwee Kok, and his wife, Neo Siew Choo, were Singaporean-Australians in their 40s who had traveled to the Hualien area as tourists.
They were last seen exiting a tour bus at the entry to Shakadang Trail in Taroko Park less than an hour before the quake on April 3, likely putting them near the trail's Wujianwu section, about 1.5km from the entrance, when the earthquake struck, authorities said.
Photo courtesy of the police
Due to the extensive damage to the trail, multiple searches by Hualien police failed to locate the couple, and last month, the Hualien District Court issued death certificates for the couple following requests by their family members.
In a statement today, the Hualien County Police Bureau said a farmer had reported finding suspected human bones in a riverbed near Wujianwu on Jan. 11.
After hiking four hours into the area to retrieve the remains, authorities compared the DNA from a hip bone to samples they had collected from the missing couple's family members, allowing them to identify the bone as Sim's, the police bureau said.
Although much of the trail area was buried by landslides during the earthquake, typhoon rains later that year may have washed the remains into the riverbed, the bureau said.
Despite searches of the surrounding area, no other human remains, including those of Sim's wife, were found, it said.
The magnitude 7.2 Hualien earthquake struck at 7:58am on April 3 last year, killing 18 people and injuring more than 1,100.
It was Taiwan's largest earthquake since 1999.
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