Police and Coast Guard officials yesterday told a Taiwan High Court hearing that none of their personnel had been deterred from voting in the presidential election because of heightened alert after President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) were shot on March 19.
"We always follow the standard procedure when carrying out necessary security measures in different situations," Liu Shih-lin (劉世林), deputy director-general of the National Police Agency said.
"During the presidential election on March 20, we did not do anything out of the ordinary," he said
Liu said that according to regulations for the presidential election, officers had to suspend their regular off days and report to work in case of an emergency. However, the agency also asked local police departments, precincts and stations to allow their officers to leave temporarily if they wished to vote.
"Most officers would have given up their right to vote to go home and sleep because they were simply too tired after work," Liu said.
"As for the total number of officers who did not vote, the agency never counted them," he said.
Liu made his testimony during a High Court hearing yesterday morning. Regarding the March 19 assassination attempt on the president and vice president, Liu testified that the agency learned of the incident from TV news.
"We heard the news at 2:25pm on March 19. But, around 2:33pm, the Tainan Police Department reported that the president and vice president were injured by firecrackers, which was later corrected and confirmed as an assassination attempt," Liu said.
According to the schedule for this week's hearings, presiding Judge Wu Ching-yuan (吳景源) will repeatedly summon head officials from the nation's military, police, security and coast guard services to figure out whether any personnel were forced to give up voting because of the activation of the so-called "national security mechanism" after the assassination attempt -- an action the pan-blue camp claims cost them the presidential election.
Coast Guard Deputy Director Yu Chien-tzu (游乾賜) testified that the Coast Guard Administration did not recall staff because of the shooting, although, following a request made by former coast guard director Wang Chun (王郡), the staff who were on duty were on a heightened alert in case those involved in the shooting attempted to flee the country.
"We have 15,825 staff members, and according to our statistics, 3,795 of them did not vote," Yu told the hearing.
"But according to our investigation, these people did not vote because their bases were too far away from polling stations," he said.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS