The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office today formally charged six people involved in a food poisoning incident at a Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) restaurant in March last year.
Six people died and 33 fell ill after ingesting bongkrek acid traced to the restaurant’s noodle dishes between March 19 and 24 at the Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store.
Prosecutors today said they have charged five people for contravening the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) and negligence causing death.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
The five are franchise owner Li Fang-hsuan (黎仿軒), store manager Wang Shun-te (王順德), substitute cook Ho Ching-fu (胡清富), head chef Chou Jih-hao (周日豪) and an intern surnamed Juan (阮).
Prosecutors said they are seeking a sentence of more than four years for Li, four years and two months for Ho, a heavy punishment for Chou, and “appropriate penalties” for Wang and Juan.
From March 14 to 17, temperatures in Xinyi District (信義) gradually rose before dropping again on March 18, meaning that the store’s air-conditioning system was turned off after business hours, prosecutors said.
Combined with cleaning procedures at the restaurant, which involved washing the kitchen floor with water that drained into a gutter, this created a hot and humid environment conducive to the type of bacteria that can produce bongkrek acid, prosecutors said.
On March 16, Chou, Juan and Ho left a basket of uneaten noodles unrefrigerated, which was then used over the subsequent days to make meals for customers, prosecutors said.
By March 19, when the noodles had been unrefrigerated for more than 63 hours, Ho used them in meals and mixed the contaminated noodles in with other ones, which were also left outside of the store’s refrigerator up until March 24, prosecutors said.
This resulted in 33 people over those few days falling ill, suffering from nausea, diarrhea and other injuries, leading to six deaths, prosecutors said.
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
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 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
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