ment for conspiring to murder a Vietnamese woman by deliberately causing a train derailment in order to collect on her life insurance. In their first ruling against Lee, the court judges reached a consensus that Lee was guilty of murdering his sister-in-law and sabotaging a public transport system, based on the testimony of 95 witnesses and the medical examination reports issued by three hospitals.
All the evidence indicates that Lee Tai-an and his younger brother, Lee Shuang-chuan, who was a railway worker, caused several train derailments in March 2006 on the South Link Line connecting the counties of Taitung and Pingtung, with the aim of killing Lee Shuang-chuan's Vietnamese wife, Chen Shi Hong Sheng or surnamed Vguyen, in order to collect on her life insurance policy.
Lee Shuang-chuan was found dead hanging from a tree near his Taitung home March 23, 2006, six days after his wife died.
The investigators had listed Lee Shuang-chuan previously as a suspect in the deliberate sabotage of the South Link Line that led to a train derailment, in which his wife died as a result of internal bleeding.
The 24-year-old Vietnamese woman was among three people, including the train driver, badly injured in the accident.
There were more than 200 passengers aboard when the express train heading from Taitung, eastern Taiwan for the southern port city of Kaohsiung derailed. Three of the passenger cars tipped over in the accident, while the locomotive was completely destroyed.
After ensuing investigations and autopsies, investigators came to the conclusion in May 2006 that Lee Shung-chuan had injected an unknown poison into his wife's body immediately after the train derailed.
Meanwhile, the Pingtung District Court also sentenced an alleged accomplice, Huang Fu-lai, to six months in prison on charges of conspiring with the Lee brothers to cause several train derailments.
In response to the court ruling, Lee's family members and lawyers said the verdict against Lee Tai-an is far from acceptable, although it is well within their expectations.
"The court should give us an acceptable reason for the life sentence against my son," said Lee Chu-pao, Tai-an's father.
"We'll surely appeal against the ruling," said Tai-an's wife Wu Tsun-fang.
But the junior Lee's lawyer Wu Han-cheng said that "we'll take a wait-and-see attitude until the second ruling," adding that he will ready additional information needed for appealing against the first ruling soon after they receive the verdict text.
On another front, Chen Shi Hong Sheng's parents are glad to hear of the life sentence against Lee Tai-an, but they also noted that the sentence is not heavy enough. "In Vietnam, such a murdering practice would make Lee face a capital penalty," they said.
Meanwhile, the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday that they would apply to the court for claiming compensation of NT$46.3 million from Lee's family to cover TRA's losses from the derailment.
Earlier, the TRA had filed an application with the court for provisional seizure of the property of Lee's family.
