A Kaohsiung man was arrested early yesterday after an alleged prank call a day earlier to the Taipei MRT system threatening to kill people on the city’s metro rail system, the Taipei City Police Department’s Songshan Precinct said in a statement.
The arrested man is a 36-year-old who has a history of making prank calls threatening violence, sources said.
The Taipei Metro Operations Control Center reported receiving a telephone call at about 7pm on Monday from a person who said he would kill people in a subway car between Nanjing Sanmin and Songshan stations on the MRT’s Green Line, the statement said.
Photo: CNA
Following the call, Taipei police and fire department personnel were deployed to Songshan Station, it said.
Joined by station personnel, they searched a subway train that pulled into the station within the time frame outlined in the call, but found nothing out of the ordinary, leading officials to conclude that the threat was a hoax, it said.
An investigation was launched and after police obtained an arrest warrant from the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, they took the caller into custody in Kaohsiung at about 2am yesterday over alleged contraventions of public safety provisions of the Criminal Code, the statement said.
Authorities found that the alleged caller held a moderate disability certificate and had a history of being arrested for making prank calls, Chinese-language media reported.
In 2024, he called Taiwan Railway Corp saying that he planned to kill people on a train, media reported, adding that he was taken into custody at the time.
The reports did not say whether charges were pressed in the earlier case.
The Criminal Code says that those who “endanger public safety by putting the public in fear of injury to life, body or property,” which can apply to prank calls, can be sentenced to up to two years in jail.
During his arrest early yesterday, the man blamed his actions on boredom and bad influences, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) reported.
His father, with whom he lives, said he was unable to prevent his son from misbehaving, the report said.
The case would be handed over to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, with the suspect to be questioned further and possibly prosecuted, the police statement said.
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