[quote]Police in Taitung County have asked people in the county to scale back activities to celebrate the Lantern Festival, saying they were concerned about a possible terrorist attack, without citing any evidence.
Saying that Taiwan cannot be free from terrorist attacks, Lei Wu-chun (雷武君), the chief of the Taitung Precinct of the Taitung County Police Bureau, has asked stores to not set up provisional altars to greet deities from local temples making their rounds during Lantern Day celebrations.
He said crowds of people gather around provisional altars as deities are paraded around, and the noise created by firecrackers is indistinguishable from gun shots, leading poliice to decide to ban the use of provisional altars.
The police and Tian Ho Temple (天后宮) have placed several other restrictions on the annual rite, resulting in only 54 temples sending deities and accompanying performance teams making the rounds, a record low.
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Lei said Taiwan ranked 113th in last year’s Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorist Index, showing that it is not free from the risk of a terrorist attack. Taiwan had a score 0.153 on a 0-10 scale in the index, with 10 indicating the highest likelihood of terrorism.
[/quote] taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/ … 2003639873
Right- I saw a couple of ISIS looking types coming out of Pete’s Pizza the other day.
I mean, why does Taitung need its biggest festival? We don’t need no tourists- we can all get rich selling Buddha-head fruit to each other.
I didn’t read anything about terrorism fears in the Chinese language press. In Taidong last night a fight broke out over a business setting off fireworks too early when some temple gang was passing by in the procession and cops had to break up the fight involving between 20 and 30 people.
Also in Changua festivities last night there was fisticuffs involving hundreds and the cops had to fire warning shots.