Taipei - A Taiwanese soldier executed for murdering a five-year-old girl 15 years ago may have been wrongly convicted, a fresh investigation into the affair has shown, officials said Sunday.
Doubts mounted about the execution of Chiang Kuo-ching, a 21-year-old serviceman executed by shooting in 1997, when another suspect, Hsu Jung-chou, was detained last week after interrogations by an ad hoc prosecutors' group.
The case has shocked the island and the questions it raised prompted Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu to call Sunday for greater care to be taken in the quality of evidence gathering.
Chiang, an air force serviceman, was convicted by a military court in 1996 on charges of murdering and raping the little girl at an air force base in Taipei.
In a letter to his father, Chiang insisted he was innocent and was coerced by a group of air force intelligence officers into confessing.
Chiang's father, who died last year, believed his son was wrongly convicted and repeatedly appealed to the top ombudsman body supervising government employees, the Control Yuan, and to the judicial authorities.
The Control Yuan impeached the military court last year saying the evidence against Chiang, including fingerprints gathered at the crime scene, was insufficient.
In response, the prosecution authorities last year ordered the formation of a special group to look into the case.
The prosecutors last week ordered the arrest of Hsu, who has twice been jailed for sexually abusing little girls since 1997 and served in the air force in 1996.
“I'll ask all prosecutors to take the case as a lesson to make sure that collection of evidence is extremely careful when looking into criminal cases, and that no innocent people are wrongly indicted in future,” Tseng told reporters in the central country of Changhua. - Sapa-AFP