Who Shot Chen Shui-Bian?

One year after Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian and his running mate Annette Lu were wounded on the eve of the island's 2004 election, Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau announced last week that it had a suspect: Chen Yi-hsiung, an unemployed man who blamed the President for his economic woes. The only problem: Chen Yi-hsiung is dead. Police say he drowned off the southern city of Tainan 10 days after the March 19 shooting, a death now considered a suicide. It's a case with huge import: hours after the attempted assassination, President Chen won re-election by a mere 0.2% margin, a vote that prompted large demonstrations in Taipei.

Working off a tip identifying Chen Yi-hsiung from video footage shot near the attack, authorities spent months tracing the bullets used in the attack to an illegal gunmaker, and then to Chen Yi-hsiung. Investigators questioned his family, who police say burned suicide notes that may have explained his actions. (His wife later appeared in a video apologizing for her husband's crime.) But President Chen's foes claim that the assassination attempt was engineered to win sympathy votes—and with Chen the suspect dead, they argue that the investigators' findings are impossible to prove. "The police reasoning is far-fetched," complains Li Yong-ping, a legislator from the opposition People First Party. "All the evidence doesn't explain such a conclusion."

It's a common sentiment: a poll last Wednesday by the China Times newspaper found that only 21% of respondents believe the theory. Even Vice President Lu said last week that she thinks there were two shooters. Facing such doubts, the police are feeling hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that will satisfy critics. "All we can do is try to piece everything together," says Hou Yu-ih, head of the Criminal Investigation Bureau. As yet, a lot of pieces are still missing.