Taiwan is continuing talks with Cambodia to prevent 179 Taiwanese fraud suspects from being deported to China, a police liaison officer in the region said yesterday.
The unnamed Ho Chi Minh City-based liaison officer for the Criminal Investigation Bureau said that the bureau has been negotiating with Cambodian authorities so that the suspects are sent to Taiwan instead to face legal consequences.
Cambodian media reports suggested that the Taiwanese suspects were to be handed over to China as a goodwill gesture to Beijing.
Photo: Reuters
The Taiwanese suspects, arrested on Monday last week during a round of raids on an online telecommunications fraud center in Phnom Penh, are scheduled to be deported on Sunday along with more than 300 Chinese.
The decision was made ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) visit to Cambodia on Thursday next week, a source said.
The Taiwanese suspects were arrested together with seven alleged Chinese coconspirators accused of running online fraud schemes, according to the Cambodia China Times.
More than 600 Taiwanese arrested overseas for their alleged involvement in fraud were deported to China between 2016 and May last year, Mainland Affairs Council data showed.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
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