The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it is looking into an incident in which a Taiwanese woman was accused of being a Chinese fugitive and held by police for four hours at Germany’s Frankfurt Airport.
Book publisher Cheng Ting (鄭莛) said that she arrived at Frankfurt Airport early on Monday to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, but was stopped at passport control after she failed an automated face identification check.
Officials asked for additional identification and asked if she was the person in the passport photo, to which she said that her face might have changed due to braces and dental surgeries.
Photo: CNA
She was then taken by police to a room for questioning, where they denied her request to contact diplomatic missions and compared her face to that of a wanted Chinese fugitive.
One officer accused her of being Chinese and claimed her passport was fake, because the number could not be found, despite her repeated explanation that she was Taiwanese, she said.
“They started shouting at me [in English]. ‘Who are you really? What’s your purpose here? I was left shaking. It was like a Netflix crime show,” Cheng said.
While inspecting her phone, police found she had posted an Instagram story on her way to the questioning room, behavior they deemed unlikely for a fugitive, and also discovered a membership card with an English signature matching her passport, confirming her identity.
After four hours, Cheng was released and told by police that the incident would be treated “as if it never happened” with no negative record.
However, she said she was also asked to sign “consent to restriction of freedom” waiver forms in German, English and simplified Chinese without a clear explanation of her rights.
“I don’t know why it took so long — all they had to do was pick up the phone and call the Taiwanese representative office,” Cheng said.
At a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said that Taiwan’s representative office in Frankfurt is seeking clarification from German authorities about the incident.
Department of European Affairs Director-General Eric Huang (黃鈞耀) said that the representative office had reached out to Cheng to provide assistance.
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