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Protesters storm Taiwan election commission building
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TAIPEI: Scores of demonstrators stormed into a government building on Friday where election officials were meeting to name Chen Shui-bian the official winner of Taiwan’s highly disputed presidential election.
The demonstrators forced their way past riot police after an earlier attempt was quickly quelled after several windows were smashed. Protestors waving national flags and those of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) appeared to have been confined to the lobby as election officials met in an upstairs room.
Protests have continued since Chen beat his sole rival Lien Chan, leader of the KMT, last Saturday by just 0.22 percent with the opposition blaming an unsolved assassination attempt on the president on the eve of polling and vote-rigging for its loss.
Meanwhile, Taiwan police on Friday released the first grainy pictures of a suspect for the attempted assassination of President Chen Shui-bian on the eve of his disputed election triumph. The footage showed a bald man walking swiftly away about 200 metres from the scene of the shooting but police admitted they had little else to link him to the gun attack after a highly scrutinised weeklong inquiry that is yet to yield its first arrest.
Chen and his vice-president, Annette Lu, were both shot and slightly injured last Friday as they campaigned in an open-top jeep in the southern city of Tainan on the eve of the country going to the polls. Chen eventually emerged as the winner the following day with a winning margin of just 0.22 percent over his sole challenger Lien Chan, chairman of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), and prompting accusations that it may have been staged to swing the result his way.
Lien claimed the shooting cost them 500,000 votes - having lost by fewer than 30,000 - but Chen angrily denied it had been a stunt and the opposition have provided nothing to back up their allegations. But police have come under growing pressure to solve the shooting to help end a political crisis that has led to days of protests outside the presidential office.
The security camera pictures showed a middle-aged bald man wearing a yellow jacket and blue trousers walking hastily to a street corner before looking around for 40 seconds and then speeding away on a purple motorcycle. The police could not tell from the footage if the man carried any weapons.
"Before the case is solved, no possibility should be ruled out," Wang Wen-chung, deputy police chief of Tainan Police Bureau, told reporters and called on the man to come forward. Reward money totalling 33 million Taiwan dollars (one million US) has been offered including 10 million each from the two parties involved in the election. Police said the attacker probably used a handgun and homemade bullets.
Firearms are illegal in Taiwan but are widely available on the black market. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the shooting or been arrested.
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