Taiwan President Shot, Later Leaves Hospital
By Jane Macartney
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian survived an assassination attempt on Friday while campaigning on the eve of a presidential election, escaping with a bullet wound to the stomach.
Vice President Annette Lu was also wounded in the attack in the southern city of Tainan but was not badly hurt, officials said. The pair were rushed to hospital, but a hospital official said later that they had left to fly back to the capital.
Officials said Saturday's election would go ahead as planned. Opposition presidential candidate Lien Chan paid a brief visit to Chen at his official Taipei residence on Friday evening.
"He is resting," Lien told reporters afterwards. "We wished the president a speedy recovery and gave him a box of ginseng."
Chen and Lu had been traveling through Tainan streets in a red open-top jeep, waving to crowds, when unknown assailants shot at them at 1:45 p.m. local time.
Police said they believed two standard handguns had been used and at least two shots fired. City police later offered a T$3 million (US$90,000) reward for information leading to the capture of the two assailants.
More than six hours after the shooting, China's official Xinhua news agency carried a terse factual report but the Chinese authorities had no official reaction. Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province to be recovered, by force if necessary.
Chen was rushed to hospital in Tainan, his home town, where he received 14 stitches in an 11-cm (five-inch) long, three-cm (one-inch) deep wound. Television reports said the 54-year-old president was able to walk into the hospital for treatment.
Lu, 59, was hit in the right leg and had to be assisted into the building but her condition was not serious, officials said.
It was unclear if the attack would affect the election outcome. Analysts said most voters had already made their choice based on policy and were unlikely to be swayed by emotion now.
Chen's chief of staff, Chiou I-jen, told a news conference that the president had called for calm.
Both the president's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the opposition Nationalists called off campaigning after the shooting.
VOTES FOR BULLETS
In the capital on Friday night, thousands of Chen supporters gathered outside DPP headquarters, singing campaign songs and chanting: "Elect A-bian" -- the president's popular nickname.
Police put the turnout at 4,000-5,000. "We feel very proud, because our own president, our leader, asked his own supporters to be calm despite what had happened," said teacher Liao Wen-bo, 61. "We are going to use our votes as our bullets tomorrow."
Chen has a loyal following among Taiwanese whose families emigrated to the island from China centuries ago. His opponents are closely identified with the "mainlander" minority who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Nationalist government lost China's civil war to Mao Zedong's Communist forces.
Chen aggressively advocates independence from China while Lien favors a conciliatory approach to the island's giant foe.
The Taiwan dollar fell 0.2 percent on initial reports of the shooting but quickly recovered. Dealers said the central bank had intervened in the market to contain the fall. The bank said it would intervene if it detected unusual currency movements.
The Investigation Bureau said police were hunting two attackers amid suspicions two guns were fired.
"The shooters probably were in the crowd because the wound to the president was on an upward trajectory," an official said.
"The gunshot occurred just as firecrackers were exploded, so we don't even know how many shots were actually fired," the bureau official told Reuters.
Wang Hsin-nan, a DPP lawmaker who was traveling in Chen's motorcade, told TVBS television that a bullet hit the vice president in the knee first, and then the president.
It was not Chen's first brush with violence. His wife, Wu Shu-chen, was run over by a lorry in Tainan in 1985 and paralyzed from the waist down. She had gone to thank her husband's supporters after he lost an election for Tainan county chief. Chen accused the Nationalists of an attempted assassination.
Their close battle could be decided by just a few hundred thousand votes out of 16.5 million.
Opinion polls are banned in the last 10 days of campaigning. Underground bookies had been offering even money on a Lien victory by a margin of 850,000 votes while on Chen they were offering odds of 1.15-1 for a win by any margin.
"Maybe this will narrow down the margin, but I doubt it will be enough to get him re-elected," said George Tsai, analyst at the Institute of International Relations in Taipei.
Chen has called a controversial referendum on boosting the island's defenses, setting the vote for Saturday alongside the presidential poll. The step has enraged Beijing, which sees the move as a harbinger of steps toward independence.
Beijing views the referendum as a dry run for a vote on Taiwan independence that it says could lead to war. (Additional reporting by Alice Hung, James Peng, Tiffany Wu, Michael Kramer, Baker Li, Kirby Chien and Richard Dobson)