The Control Yuan on Tuesday impeached two Marine Corps officers for their suspected involvement in a case in which a handgun, believed to have been stolen from an armory in Pingtung in 2022, was allegedly replaced with a model gun.
The .45 caliber handgun is believed to have been stolen during preparations from Feb. 7 to March 4 for a military refresher training session scheduled to take place over the following 14 days at a Marine Corps recruit training center in Pingtung, three Control Yuan members investigating the case said in a statement.
The commanding officer of the Marine Corps Recruit Training Center, Colonel Pan Tong-shen (潘東昇) was impeached because, even after being informed that a .45 caliber handgun belonging to the 2nd battalion at the center was missing, he did not report the matter within 30 minutes to the Ministry of National Defense as required by regulations, the statement said.
Photo: Yang Cheng-yu, Taipei Times
To avoid being held responsible for the missing weapon, Pan is accused of tacitly allowing then-battalion commander Lin Chia-wei (林家葳) and four company commanders to raise funds to purchase a simulation model gun, and then stored the replica in the armory.
Even after the new battalion commander discovered that something was wrong with the gun during the inventory handover and reported it to Pan, he only recorded the gun as malfunctioning and continued to conceal the loss of the original weapon.
The Control Yuan members said Pan violated the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍刑法) regarding making false military orders, documents or other statements knowing them to be false, as well as regulations on making false entries in a public document and rules governing national ordnance, ammunition and explosive materials management.
Lin and four company commanders are accused of conspiring to purchase a model gun and storing it in the armory in place of the missing .45-caliber handgun.
As part of the cover-up, the accused etched the same serial number into the air gun as the lost weapon, which has yet to be found, the statement said.
An undersea cable to Penghu County has been severed, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said today, with a Chinese-funded ship suspected of being responsible. It comes just a month after a Chinese ship was suspected of severing an undersea cable north of Keelung Harbor. The National Communications and Cyber Security Center received a report at 3:03am today from Chunghwa Telecom that the No. 3 cable from Taiwan to Penghu was severed 14.7km off the coast of Tainan, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) upon receiving a report from Chunghwa Telecom began to monitor the Togolese-flagged Hong Tai (宏泰)
A cat named Mikan (蜜柑) has brought in revenue of more than NT$10 million (US$305,390) for the Kaohsiung MRT last year. Mikan, born on April 4, 2020, was a stray cat before being adopted by personnel of Kaohsiung MRT’s Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station. Mikan was named after a Japanese term for mandarin orange due to his color and because he looks like an orange when curled up. He was named “station master” of Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station in September 2020, and has since become famous. With Kaohsiung MRT’s branding, along with the release of a set of cultural and creative products, station master Mikan
RISING TOURISM: A survey showed that tourist visits increased by 35 percent last year, while newly created attractions contributed almost half of the growth Changhua County’s Lukang Old Street (鹿港老街) and its surrounding historical area clinched first place among Taiwan’s most successful tourist attractions last year, while no location in eastern Taiwan achieved a spot in the top 20 list, the Tourism Administration said. The listing was created by the Tourism Administration’s Forward-looking Tourism Policy Research office. Last year, the Lukang Old Street and its surrounding area had 17.3 million visitors, more than the 16 million visitors for the Wenhua Road Night Market (文化路夜市) in Chiayi City and 14.5 million visitors at Tainan’s Anping (安平) historical area, it said. The Taipei 101 skyscraper and its environs —
Taiwan on Friday said a New Zealand hamburger restaurant has apologized for a racist remark to a Taiwanese customer after reports that it had first apologized to China sparked outrage in Taiwan. An image posted on Threads by a Taiwanese who ate at Fergburger in Queenstown showed that their receipt dated Sunday last week included the words “Ching Chang,” a racial slur. The Chinese Consulate-General in Christchurch in a statement on Thursday said it had received and accepted an apology from the restaurant over the incident. The comment triggered an online furor among Taiwanese who saw it as an insult to the
RSS