Taiwan's Leader and Deputy Are Shot on Election Eve

Saturday, March 20, 2004
By Joseph Kahn & Keith Bradsher

New York Times Writers

The police offered a $90,000 reward for information leading to the capture of whoever fired the shots. The opposition Nationalists offered even more, pledging to pay $300,000.

TAINAN, Taiwan -- NYT
The president and vice president of Taiwan were shot Friday afternoon in this southern Taiwanese city, on the eve of bitterly contested national elections. Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, however, and the polls opened as scheduled on Saturday morning.

President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were standing in the back of an open-roofed red Jeep driving slowly through streets crowded with supporters in Tainan, the president's hometown, when a bullet struck the president in the abdomen, police and government spokesmen said.

Supporters were discharging large numbers of firecrackers, and the president at first thought he had been hit by one, only to find his abdomen becoming wet with blood, Chiou I-Jen, the secretary general of the presidential office, said in a news briefing in Taipei.

The president and vice president were taken to the Chi Mei Medical Center in Tainan, where they were treated and released. They returned to Taipei on Friday night.

A bullet was found lodged between the skin of the president's abdomen and his undershirt, having apparently torn a wound four inches long, an inch wide and an inch deep, medical officials said in a televised briefing. He received stitches for the wound, they said.

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2004 © The New York Times Company.

Dan