China claims Taiwan is part of its territory, and Hong Kong, a semiautonomous region of China, is wary of any arrangement that would seem to confer recognition on Taiwan’s government. Taiwanese officials, for their part, have complained about a lack of cooperation from Hong Kong, and they have questioned whether they would receive enough assistance from the city’s authorities to successfully prosecute Mr. Chan.
“According to the Hong Kong side, if we make a request for evidence with regards to Chan’s surrender, the Hong Kong side will actively cooperate. But it also said there is no law for cooperating with Taiwan on criminal justice,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement on Sunday. “We plan to ask the Hong Kong government, based on this contradictory statement, how can you provide assistance to us?”
Hong Kong officials say such reservations risk undermining the opportunity to prosecute Mr. Chan. The city’s No. 2 official, Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung, on Tuesday urged Taiwan not to “complicate a simple issue” or “try to exploit politics in order to achieve certain gain at the expense, particularly, of justice.”
Mr. Chan, 20, a Hong Kong resident, was sentenced in April to 29 months in prison for money laundering over possession of valuables that had belonged to his girlfriend, Poon Hiu-wing, also from Hong Kong. He had traveled with her to Taiwan in February 2018, but returned alone.
Mr. Chan later told the Hong Kong police that he had strangled Ms. Poon, put her body in a suitcase and hid it in some bushes. Investigators found her body near a subway station in northern Taiwan.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/world/asia/hong-kong-extradition.html
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