TAIPEI, Taiwan – President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president were shot and slightly wounded Friday as they waved to onlookers from an open vehicle during an election-eve campaign event. Authorities said the assassination attempt wouldn’t halt a hotly contested election.

After Chen’s release from a hospital in the southwestern city of Tainan, the 54-year-old leader returned to the capital and asked Taiwanese not to worry about his – or the island’s – security.

“Thanks to the good care and treatment by the medical staff, I am now all right, so please set your minds at ease,” said Chen in a videotaped statement, looking wan and wearing a sweater vest. “Our national security is ensured. Please stay at ease.”

The attack on Chen at 1:45 p.m. in Tainan also injured Vice President Annette Lu, 59, who stood beside him in the back of a red open-top jeep as it toured Tainan in a campaign convoy. Lu was slightly wounded in the right leg.

Physicians attending Chen said they placed 14 stitches to close an inch-deep, nearly 5-inch-long grazing wound to his abdomen.

Chen never lost consciousness.

Police made no arrests in the tumultuous scene after the attack.

It was a remarkably close call for Chen at a moment when tension between Taiwan and China is soaring. Motives for the attack remained unclear. The military heightened monitoring of the Taiwan Strait separating the island from China.

Chen is in a neck-to-neck race for re-election with Lien Chan, 67, of the opposition Nationalist Party, in a hotly contested campaign that’s focused on Taiwan’s tense relations with neighboring China.

Lien said he was “very, very shocked” by the attack. Later in the evening, he visited Chen at his official residence.

Chen has angered the Chinese government by calling on Taiwanese to vote Saturday to approve a nationwide referendum on China’s missile threat to Taiwan. Beijing sees the vote as part of creeping efforts by Taiwan to declare itself a sovereign nation. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, although it hasn’t ruled the island in more than a century.

Campaign officials canceled huge rallies across the country, fearing an outbreak of partisan violence. They said, however, that the presidential election and referendum on Saturday would proceed.


“The idea is to cool down the crowds as we move through the most shocking incident ever since the government moved from mainland China to Taiwan” in 1949, said Huang Zhih-fang, a government spokesman.

The attack came as Chen’s motorcade rolled down a crowded street in his hometown of Tainan, where he’s hugely popular. Fireworks sounded on both sides of the road, ringing out loudly and blurring the scene in smoke. Initial radio reports said fireworks had injured Chen.

Television images showed Chen putting his hand on his abdomen sometime after the shot or shots were fired and finding blood.

Three- and four-story buildings lined the road, and throngs crowded the streets.

Chen normally travels with a phalanx of two dozen well-trained security guards, some of whom were in adjacent motorcycles. He and Lu, however, had no visible protection when the shooting occurred.

Police combing the street later recovered two shell casings of what appeared to be small-caliber handgun bullets.

While Taiwanese politics are often deeply impassioned, campaign violence isn’t common. Chen, however, has accused the Nationalists of trying to kill his wife in 1985 when she was run over by a truck. She was left paralyzed below the waist. Nationalists deny they were behind the accident.

Officials downplayed speculation that the attack was aimed at stirring international tensions with neighboring China, but they said they were on alert.

“The Ministry of Defense will continue to monitor the situation in the Taiwan Strait. So far, everything is normal and calm,” Defense Minister Tang Yiau-min said.

Chen’s narrow escape may well bring him some additional support from sympathetic undecided voters. Turnout is expected to top 80 percent of Taiwan’s 16.5 million voters. While polls are banned for 10 days before the election, pollsters say only a few thousand votes may separate the two candidates.

Many Taiwanese reacted with disbelief to the attack. Given the intense nature of the campaign, conspiracy theories abounded.

Some supporters of Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party cast blame on the Nationalist Party or on China. Opponents suggested the attack was an election gambit.

Chen, a pro-independence lawyer and former mayor of Taipei, won election in 2000 on a campaign to push farther and faster on seeking the island’s sovereignty from China. His triumph marked the end of 51 years of rule by the Nationalist Party, which fled the mainland after the communist takeover there in 1949.

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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ARCHIVE PHOTOS on KRT Direct (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): Chen Shui-bian

GRAPHICS (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20040319 Chen Shuibian, 20040318 TAIWAN election

AP-NY-03-19-04 1622EST