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A court in Taiwan awarded Chunghwa Telecom more than half a million US dollars in compensation for the damage a Chinese vessel caused to a subsea telecom cable. The financial award comes on top of a three-year prison sentence Taiwan imposed in June 2025 on the Chinese national who was commanding a decrepit vessel with a murky identity.
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It came out in court in June 2025 that the captain, who would only give his name as Wang according to media reports, had ordered two sailors to drop anchor in a well-marked zone prohibiting anchoring and marked on charts to have critical undersea infrastructure. Early on the morning of February 25, the vessel was observed moving in a zigzag pattern. Chunghwa Telecom reported an outage on its cable Tai-Peng 3, which runs to the offshore islands of Penghu.
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A court in Taiwan convicted the captain in June 2025 and sentenced him to three years in jail [...] The captain later appealed, but a court in Taiwan rejected his case.
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This and several other incidents prompted Taiwan to dramatically increase its monitoring of vessels. It said it was specifically targeting ships with third-world flags like the Togo registry of this vessel. It asserted that the vessels are all Chinese-owned and present an increasing danger to Taiwan as tensions escalate with China and the demands for reunification.