Chen Yi-hsiung is the prime suspect

Suspect

In the parlance of criminal justice, a suspect is a known person suspected of committing a crime.Police and reporters often incorrectly use the word suspect when referring to the...

 in the 3-19 shooting incident

3-19 shooting incident

The 3-19 shooting incident was an assassination attempt on President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu while they were campaigning in Tainan on March 19, 2004, the day before Taiwan's presidential election...

, a failed attempt to assassinate the president

President of the Republic of China

The President of the Republic of China is the head of state and commander-in-chief of the Republic of China . The Republic of China was founded on January 1, 1912, to govern all of China...

 of Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

 Chen Shui-bian

Chen Shui-bian

Chen Shui-bian is a former Taiwanese politician who was the 10th and 11th-term President of the Republic of China from 2000 to 2008. Chen, whose Democratic Progressive Party has traditionally been supportive of Taiwan independence, ended more than fifty years of Kuomintang rule in Taiwan...

, and perhaps vice president

Vice President of the Republic of China

The Vice President of the Republic of China is the second-highest executive official of the Republic of China . The existing office was created in 1948 under the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China...

 Annette Lu

Annette Lu

Annette Lu Hsiu-lien , was the Vice President of the Republic of China from 2000 to 2008, under Chen Shui-bian. She announced her intentions to run for President of Taiwan on March 6, 2007, but withdrew in order to support DPP presidential nominee, Frank Hsieh...

, on 19 March 2004, one day prior to the 2004 presidential election. Chen was unemployed and blamed the president for his economic woes.

Finding Chen Yi-hsiung

Working off of clues from a video that was shot near the attack, authorities spent months tracing the bullets used in the assassination attempt to an illegal gun maker. After questioning the individual, investigators were able to follow the purchase to Chen Yi-hsiung, who was found drowned in a harbour in Tainan 10 days after the attack.

Controversy

While the case has officially been closed, with the main suspect Chen Yi-hsiung dead, police are having a hard time proving their theory. While Chen Yi-hsiung's death was officially ruled a suicide, with both suicide notes (supposedly burned by his family) and a video of his wife apologizing for her husband's crime backing up this theory, opponents of president Chen disagree with this conclusion. President Chen's foes claim that the assassination attempt was planned in order to win sympathy votes, which led to president Chen winning the election by just over 29,500 votes, barely hours after the attempted assassination.

One theory, supported by Vice President Lu herself, is that there may have been two shooters. Whatever the case, the common sentiment is that few people, only 21% in a poll by the pan blue China Times

China Times

The China Times is a newspaper published in the Republic of China in Traditional Chinese. It is one of the four biggest newspapers in Taiwan, the other three being the Liberty Times, United Daily News, and Apple Daily ....

newspaper, believe that Chen Yi-hsiung was the sole assailant and engineer of the attack.

External links

• Taiwan Assassin 3/19