An investigation into the possible use of sedatives at a preschool in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止) has been closed and no criminal charges have been filed, the Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office said on Wednesday.
The probe, which began on June 15, included a review of the school’s security footage and questioning of its staff, as well as consultations with personnel at the hospitals where the students were tested for drugs, it said in a statement, adding that no evidence of criminal behavior was found.
However, a separate investigation of the child whose initial drug test results sparked the school probe would remain open, it said.
Fears about possible sedative use at the Sijhih preschool were raised amid an investigation into a separate preschool in Banciao District (板橋), where testing found traces of barbiturates in eight students.
Amid news coverage of the probe in Banciao, the parents of one student at the Sijhih school on June 9 and June 12 took their child to get tested for controlled substances.
New Taipei City authorities said the child’s urine tests detected traces of benzodiazepines — depressants that produce sedation — but at levels that are considered a negative result.
To relieve the fears of parents of children at the preschool, the New Taipei City Government offered free drug tests to all of its students.
Of those tests, one student had a result that came close to the detection threshold for phenobarbital, a barbiturate, but after using a more precise liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry test, it was not detected, the city government said.
After the probe’s conclusion, New Taipei City Mayor and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Hou You-yi’s (侯友宜) campaign office called on one of his main opponents, Vice President William Lai (賴清德) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to apologize for “spreading rumors and creating a national panic” over the sedative allegations.
Lai and other DPP lawmakers had criticized Hou for “neglecting” the preschool investigations in favor of his presidential campaign, while Hou accused them of trying to take advantage of the issue.
Lai’s campaign on Wednesday said Hou should not use the closure of the Sijhih probe to “absolve himself” of his slow response to the Banciao case, which is still under investigation.
Regarding the Banciao case, the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said that it would receive the students’ hair follicle drug test results next week.
The tests used a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method, which is highly accurate, does not return “false” or “weak” positive results and can detect drugs ingested up to three months prior to testing, the office said.
The New Taipei City Government on Wednesday said that it would complete an administrative investigation into the Banciao preschool, and aims to publish it by July 15.
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