Taipei, Sept. 19 (CNA) A group of 279 Taiwanese fraud suspects arrived home aboard two separate flights under police escort Wednesday, following their deportation from the Philippines.

The mass deportation made history in Taiwan as the largest cross-border transfer of criminals, police said.

The deportees were members of a Taiwan-led telephone fraud ring that was based in Manila and targeted mainland Chinese. The gang allegedly swindled hundreds of millions of Chinese yuan from thousands of victims.

It was busted in massive raids carried out Aug. 23 by Philippine police based on tipoffs from Taiwan. A total of 377 people were arrested, including 291 Taiwanese and 86 Chinese.

All the Taiwanese suspects were sent home except for one who died from dengue fever while in detention. Several others under investigation for their involvement in other criminal acts, including attacking Philippine police officers while in detention, also remained in the Philippines.

(By Liu Shih-yi and Y.F. Low)
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