Superior Court upholds seven rulings in shooting case

The Tainan High Court branch on Wednesday upheld seven of eight sentences in a series of appeals related to a submachine gun shooting during a local election campaign in Tainan in late 2022.

The only exception was the sentence of Lee Chi-han (李奇漢), which was overturned.

Although Lee was found not guilty in the first trial, the second trial found him guilty of complicity in threats against others.

Photo: Taipei Times

Lee was sentenced to one year in prison, a court news release showed.

Lee was found to have driven the gunman, Kung Hsiang-chih (孔祥志), who was his acquaintance, and helped him change clothes after the shooting, the court said.

The verdicts for the other people involved remained unchanged since the first trial in Tainan District Court in February, which ranged from acquittals to sentences of up to 10 years, he added.

Although prosecutors believed that Wang Wen-tsung (王文宗), president of Ciji Temple in Tainan’s Syuejia District (學甲), was the mastermind behind the shooting, the district court only found him guilty of harboring a wanted fugitive. .

Wang received a six-month sentence, which was commuted to a fine.

The court said it had imposed a lighter sentence as prosecutors could not provide sufficient evidence that Wang had planned the shooting.

Meanwhile, a close associate of Wang, Hung Cheng-chun (洪政軍), was found guilty of being directly involved in planning the shooting and of recruiting Kung as the triggerman.

Hung received a 10-year prison sentence.

According to prosecutors, on November 10, 2022, Kung carried out two attacks on properties owned by former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Central Executive Committee member Kuo Tsai-chin (郭再欽) and former independent city councilor of Tainan, Hsieh Tsai-wang (謝財旺). .

Kung fired 58 shots at a business owned by Kuo and fired 30 shots at the campaign headquarters of Hsieh’s daughter, Hsieh Shu-fan (謝舒凡), who was the DPP candidate for Tainan City Council, they said.

Neither location was occupied at the time of the shooting, so no one was injured.

Hung and Kung fled to Chinese-controlled Fujian province in November 2022 and were arrested by Chinese police on January 18 last year.

They were repatriated to Taiwan in February of the same year.