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.
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
Ferry operators are planning to provide a total of 1,429 journeys between Taiwan proper and its offshore islands to meet increased travel demand during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, the Maritime and Port Bureau said yesterday. The available number of ferry journeys on eight routes from Saturday next week to Feb. 2 is expected to meet a maximum transport capacity of 289,414 passengers, the bureau said in a news release. Meanwhile, a total of 396 journeys on the "small three links," which are direct ferries connecting Taiwan's Kinmen and Lienchiang counties with China's Fujian Province, are also being planned to accommodate
BITTERLY COLD: The inauguration ceremony for US president-elect Donald Trump has been moved indoors due to cold weather, with the new venue lacking capacity A delegation of cross-party lawmakers from Taiwan, led by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), for the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, would not be able to attend the ceremony, as it is being moved indoors due to forecasts of intense cold weather in Washington tomorrow. The inauguration ceremony for Trump and US vice president-elect JD Vance is to be held inside the Capitol Rotunda, which has a capacity of about 2,000 people. A person familiar with the issue yesterday said although the outdoor inauguration ceremony has been relocated, Taiwan’s legislative delegation has decided to head off to Washington as scheduled. The delegation
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS