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.
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