[color=red]This is an official SSETT work advisory [/color]for all foriegn nationals in the greater [color=red]Chaiyi City and Chaiyi County [/color]areas.
The post below, is not an isolated incident. It is the first such incident in several years to result in a death of a teacher. We feel that this represents a new danger for all foreigners regardless of nationality.
We strongly recommend all persons in the area of Chaiyi County, to use extreme caution and relocate to safer areas.
This danger specifically applies to non Asian females. There have been several unconfirmed reports of abductions and sexual assaults in the area prescribed.
Please be careful.
A.
http://www.voy.com/113223/
When 23-year-old Australian teacher Elizabeth Bretel, who was working in Chiayi City as an English teacher at a local bushiban, died in what the police have called a freak accident, not everyone in the southern Taiwan city was convinced. Although news stories in both the China Post and the Taipei Times on the island called the death an accident, there are rumors floating around Chiayi City that the woman was the victim of a love affair gone wrong and that she was killed by a local man with so-called “seedy” connections. All this, of course, is “off the record.” Of course.
However, an Australian woman who knew Bretel told a reporter by phone in Australia that Bretel had been involved in a love affair with a young man with known, so-called “unfriendly” connections, and when Bretel wanted to break off the romance, “the man went beserk and threatened her life, her dog, the whole nine yards of male anger.” Bretel had even tried, apparently, to leave Chiayi a few weeks before she died, but she was stopped by her boyfriend on the train to Taipei and turned back, this reporter was told in an anonymous e-mail from Taiwan. The man also threatened to kill her dog, the email said.
Although police have concluded with an autopsy report, stamped and sealed by government officials, that says Bretel died from an accidental fall down a stairways in her apartment building on a rainy night (she apparently slipped and fell), many expats in the Chiayi area are pretty sure that it was not an accident, according to reports coming to Australia. Bretel lived on the 3rd floor of her building, and the police report says she fell from a 5th floor balcony. Go figure. Connect the dots. Local boyfriend with alleged seedy connections, love affair gone awry, male ego damaged heavily by break-up of love affair, death threats, freak accident on a rainy night. Was this an accident? You decide.
According to another email from Chiayi City, from an American woman who knew Bretel, the roof of Bretel’s apartment building showed a wine glass and some home work papers she was apparently correcting at the time of the “accident.” This scene may have been set up by seedy people involved in the “accident,” according to the worried email.
TAIPEI TIMES, January 29: “Police have yet to determine the cause of death of a 23-year-old Australian who taught English in Chiayi. On Saturday, Elizabeth Yvette Bretel was found unconscious, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of her apartment stairs.
She was taken to St. Martin de Porres Hospital, but doctors could do little to save her life. Police believe that Bretel fell, although forensic experts have yet to reveal the results of an autopsy.”
TAIPEI TIMES, Jan. 29: "Though police note that Bretel was found with a wound to her head, they ordered an autopsy to determine whether the cause of death was due to an accident or other reasons. ‘We will be able to learn more about this case after we receive the results of the autopsy,’ said Shih Kun-mo (
