The Taipei District Court yesterday sentenced Chang Tzu-yen (張子彥) to six years in prison for placing hidden cameras in school and public toilets to secretly film women and girls, as well as circulating the recordings.
Two years of the sentence can be commuted to a fine and the ruling can be appealed.
Prosecutors had asked for a harsh punishment as a deterrent after an investigation found that Chang, 26, secretly filmed more than 160 girls and women mainly in Taipei and New Taipei City.
The court said that it found Chang, a recent graduate of the National Taipei University of Technology, guilty of violating the personal privacy of the victims.
Investigators had found the videos stored in Chang’s computer and tried to identify the victims, including junior-high school students and university students, as well as a police officer.
Forty of the victims filed judicial complaints against Chang.
During the court hearing, one of victims testified that she suffered mental anguish and has been afraid of going to public toilets since the incident.
One victim was quoted as saying: “When the video was shown to me, it felt like I was being raped. This man is a pervert.”
Another at the court hearing said: “I feel quite sick seeing Chang here in court. He must receive a heavy punishment for what he has done... Now I need a friend to accompany me when I use a public toilet.”
Investigators found that Chang started secretly filming women and girls in 2015.
He was caught in April 2018 when a cleaner found a hidden camera, including memory cards, inside a women’s restroom at National Taiwan University (NTU) College of Medicine.
The camera was traced to Chang and police in a search of his apartment in New Taipei City found more explicit videos of unidentified women in his computer.
Investigators examining the footage determined that Chang had sneaked into women’s restrooms on the NTU campus and other Taipei universities, as well as Taipei First Girls’ High School and Taipei Zhongshan Girls’ High School.
He also placed cameras inside the public bathrooms of city government buildings in Taipei and New Taipei City, they said.
Chang rated the women in the videos according to their attractiveness, and tracked some of them through social media to learn their identities, investigators said.
He allegedly followed them and took their photographs for his categorized video files, they said.
Investigators found that Chang had passed on the videos to at least two of his friends for their viewing.
They also found Chang followed high-school dance clubs’ social media pages to find out where they were practicing and installed hidden cameras inside the bathrooms at those locations.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
CHANGING LANDSCAPE: Many of the part-time programs for educators were no longer needed, as many teachers obtain a graduate degree before joining the workforce, experts said Taiwanese universities this year canceled 86 programs, Ministry of Education data showed, with educators attributing the closures to the nation’s low birthrate as well as shifting trends. Fifty-three of the shuttered programs were part-time postgraduate degree programs, about 62 percent of the total, the most in the past five years, the data showed. National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) discontinued the most part-time master’s programs, at 16: chemistry, life science, earth science, physics, fine arts, music, special education, health promotion and health education, educational psychology and counseling, education, design, Chinese as a second language, library and information sciences, mechatronics engineering, history, physical education
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
RSS