HUALIEN, Taiwan — A Taiwan court on Saturday released on
bond the manager of a construction site whose truck authorities believe caused
a train accident that killed at least 51 people, as family members mourned the
dead at the crash site.
اضافة اعلان
The crash on Friday was Taiwan’s worst rail accident in
seven decades, when an express train hit the truck that had slid down a bank
beside the track from the building site. The site’s manager is suspected of
having failed to properly engage the truck’s brake.
The train, with almost 500 people aboard, was travelling
from Taipei, the capital, to Taitung on the east coast when it derailed in a
tunnel just north of the city of Hualien. Forty one people are in hospital,
from among the 188 reported injured.
Prosecutors had applied to a court to detain the manager on
charges of causing death by negligence, a justice ministry official told
reporters on Saturday.
But a court in Hualien released the manager, Lee Yi-hsiang,
on a bond of T$500,000 ($17,525), although it restricted him from leaving
Taiwan for eight months and said he had to stay in Hualien.
The court said that while the truck’s fall into the path of
the train was possibly due to negligence, there was “no possibility of
conspiracy”.
Yu Hsiu-duan, head of the Hualien prosecutors’ office, said
they were not pleased with the decision.
“The court said there was no reason to keep him in custody,”
she told reporters. “The court changed it to a surety of $T500,000.”
Lee’s court-appointed lawyer declined to comment to
reporters as he left the court.
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