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Chen shooting complicated by
politics, Lee says
Staff Writer, with CNA
US based forensic scientist Henry
Lee smiles at a press conference in Los Angeles on Monday marking eight years
since the shooting of former president Chen Shui-bian on March 19, 2004.
Photo: CNA
Henry Lee (李昌鈺), a US-based forensic
scientist, said on Monday that the shooting of former president Chen Shui-bian
(陳水扁) on the eve of the presidential election in 2004 was a minor case, but it
created a lot of pressure.
The shooting on March 19, 2004, in which Chen’s abdomen was wounded, was a minor
case compared with others he had dealt with, such as war crimes in Croatia and
Bosnia and a review of former US president John Kennedy’s assassination, Lee
said at a press conference in Los Angeles on the eighth anniversary of the “319
Incident.”
However, Lee said he faced great pressure, which was mostly unnecessary, in the
Chen case because of its political implications.
Lee was asked to assist in the investigation of the incident, in which a bullet
grazed Chen’s abdomen and another slightly injured then-vice president Annette
Lu (呂秀蓮) at a presidential election campaign motorcade in Tainan.
In a report submitted in August 2004, Lee concluded that the shooting was not a
planned assassination attempt, in which case “a more powerful weapon than a
homemade pistol would have been used.”
Some pundits said the incident helped Chen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
gain sympathy votes that earned him a razor-thin victory over the Chinese
Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, Lien Chan (連戰).
On Monday, Lee gave a Power-Point presentation that detailed aspects of the
shooting, such as the bullets used, their trajectory and the type of gun from
which they were shot.
As a forensic expert, Lee said, his work is to review all available evidence and
reach a conclusion.
He said the bullets that wounded Chen and Lu came from the same gun, which was
traced to the man who made it, Tang Shou-yi (唐守義).
It was last used by Chen Yi-hsiung (陳義雄), who died under suspicious
circumstances, Lee said.
Chen Yi-hsiung’s body was found in a pond on March 28, 2004. Lee said the body
was cremated almost immediately after death, so it could not be determined
whether Chen Yi-hsiung had died in the water.
The shooting case was officially closed after investigators concluded that Chen
Yi-hsiung had acted alone.
Last week, Lu called on the government to reopen the case, and the DPP
legislative caucus on Monday proposed setting up a special review committee to
re-examine the incident.
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