More than 10,000 attend funeral for late Taiwan crime boss

Nov 8, 2007, 13:24 GMT

Taipei - More than 10,000 people, including influential politicians, on Thursday attended the funeral of a reputed gang leader, who died earlier last month of pancreatic cancer at the age of 63, local TV media reported.

The funeral for Chen Chi-li, leader of the Bamboo Union Gang, Taiwan's largest underground society, saw big crime bosses, popular politicians, business leaders and show business people gathering at a packed ceremony to pay their last respects to the late gangster, the reports said.

More than 800 police were deployed to prevent feuding gangs from launching in street fights.

TV footage showed some officers busily checking the identities of mourners who appeared to be gangsters, and using sophisticated high- tech gadgets to monitor their activities.

Police later arrested five people and questioned 26 others suspected of having links to organized crime when the suspects were about to attend the funeral, which was dubbed the event of the century by local news media.

Chen, made famous for his killing of Taiwanese-US writer Henry Liu in San Francisco in 1984, died in Hong Kong last month.

Court records showed he acted on the order of then military intelligence chief Wang Hsi-ling in killing Liu, who was writing a biography highly critical of then President Chiang Ching-kuo of the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT).

Chen was later arrested and given a life sentence but was allowed to post bail in 1991 following two amnesty programmes.

In 1996, he fled to Cambodia after an island-wide crackdown on organized crime.

He went to Hong Kong last year from Cambodia for cancer treatment and died on October 4 in Hong Kong.

Local media reports said his family spent 2 million Taiwan dollars (61,528 US dollars) to charter a China Airlines Airbus plane to take the body, friends and relatives of Chen back to Taiwan. They shed another 20 million Taiwan dollars on holding the grand funeral.