A Kaohsiung man was arrested early this morning after calling the Taipei metro system threatening to kill people on a city subway, the Taipei Police Department said.
The suspect is a 36-year-old man who reportedly has a history of making prank calls threatening violence, several sources said.
Photo: CNA
In a news release, the department's Songshan Precinct said the Taipei Metro Operations Control Center reported receiving a phone call at about 7pm yesterday from a person who claimed he would kill people in a subway car between Nanjing Sanmin Station and Songshan Station.
Following the call, members of the Taipei police and fire departments were deployed to Songshan Station.
Joined by station personnel, they searched a train that pulled into the station within the suspected time frame as well as the station, but did not find any victims, leading officials to deem the threat a hoax.
An investigation was launched, and after obtaining an arrest warrant from the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office, police took the caller into custody in Kaohsiung at about 2am on suspicion of contravening public safety provisions of the Criminal Code.
According to several local media sources, authorities found that the caller has a moderate disability certificate and a history of being arrested for making prank calls.
He was reportedly found to have made a call in 2024 to Taiwan Railway Corp claiming that he would commit killings on a train and was also taken into custody at the time, but sources did not say what happened to him after that.
Under the Criminal Code, people who "endanger public safety by putting the public in fear of injury to life, body or property," which could apply to prank calls, can be sentenced to up to two years in jail.
Given the possibility of him having a disability, the caller could also be required to be admitted to a mental health institution instead.
During his arrest, the caller blamed his actions on boredom and bad influences, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) reported.
His father who lives with him said he was unable to prevent his son from misbehaving, the report said.
The case would be handed over to Taipei prosecutors for further questioning and possible prosecution as a part of the ongoing investigation.
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