The Taipei Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday charged a 65-year-old man surnamed Ko (柯) with embezzlement of lost property over money that he found on a hill in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖), which was part of a NT$83 million (US$2.59 million at current exchange rates) theft from First Commercial Bank ATMs by an international criminal ring.
Ko claimed that he had accidentally stumbled upon a bag containing NT$4.54 million in cash on a hill in Xihu Park on July 20 and later reported his find to police.
According to a Chinese-language media report, key evidence for the prosecution is that Ko allegedly returned to the hill with the apparent intention of taking home another bag in a nearby trash pile, which was allegedly hidden by a Lativian man, Andrejs Peregudovs, the key suspect in the ATM heist who was arrested on July 17 in Yilan County.
Photo: CNA
Judicial investigators took Peregudovs to the hill to reconstruct his route so that they could recover the money.
They only found one bag containing NT$12.63 million.
Peregudovs said another bag was missing.
As Ko was acting suspiciously, a passerby took a photograph of him on the hill, which later started circulating on the news, with investigators seeking to identify the man in the picture.
In yesterday’s indictment, Shilin prosecutors said that as it took 16 hours for Ko to report his find to the police, during that time there had been extensive news coverage of the Latvian suspect’s retrieval of the stolen money and the other missing bag, and Ko would have become aware that the money he had found was part of the heist.
Although Ko did go the police of his own volition and hand in the money, prosecutors charged Ko with embezzlement, because he had violated the law by keeping money connected with a criminal case.
The investigation took many months, as there had been some speculation that Ko had been working for the gang involved in the heist to recover the money.
However, judicial investigators said that they ruled out that possibility after going through Ko’s communication records and other evidence.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in September charged the three foreign suspects — Peregudovs, a Romanian man named Mihail Colibaba, and a Moldovan man named Niklae Penkov — with fraud and offenses against computer security, and is seeking 12-year jail terms for the three.
During a trial hearing earlier this month, Peregudovs again apologized to Taiwanese for his involvement in the case, claiming that he was only a money collector acting under instructions and asking for permission to communicate with his family in Latvia.
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
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
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
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS