TAIWAN: Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and his vice-president were shot and wounded during the closing stages of a dramatic presidential election campaign which has focused on the military threat from the Chinese mainland. Clifford Coonan reports from Beijing
The shooting of Mr Chen and his vice-president, Ms Annette Lu, came less than 24 hours before polls were due to open in the election and a referendum today, when voters decide whether the island should boost its defences against hundreds of Chinese missiles pointed at it from across the Straits of Taiwan.
Mr Chen and his Nationalist Party challenger, Mr Lien Chan, have been neck-and-neck in most opinion polls but political analysts said the shooting could generate sympathy for Mr Chen and clinch him the vote.
The shooting happened as Mr Chen and Ms Lu were driving in an open Jeep along a street jammed with Chen's supporters in his hometown of Tainan, in the south of the island.
Mr Chen's stomach was grazed by a bullet while Ms Lu was hit in the right knee. People were setting off celebratory fireworks as the vehicle drove by, and early reports said the injuries were caused by firecrackers.
The president was able to walk into the hospital emergency room after the shooting and gave a televised message hours after the shooting to reassure viewers about his health and Taiwan's security.
"There's no problem with A-bian," Mr Chen said, referring to himself by his nickname.
There was no report of arrests, and it was not clear what the motive was for yesterday's attack. At least two shots were fired and Mr Liu Shih-lin, deputy chief of the National Police, said there might have been more than one gunman, as the bullets came from different directions.
The Nationalist Party condemned the attack.
As leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Mr Chen's main political aim is for Taiwan to lose its status as an estranged part of China and become an independent sovereign state.
The opposition Nationalist Party has strongly criticised him for pushing the referendum. It says it will only antagonise Beijing.
The United States has also criticised the referendum, as have France, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Beijing sees the referendum as a precursor to a future vote on Taiwanese independence, something which China says would lead to war.
Premier Wen Jiabao restated the Beijing government's views on Taiwan last week when he said: "They have undermined this universally recognised principle of 'one China' and threatened stability in the Straits of Taiwan."
Beijing waited more than six hours to publicly report the shooting, and then only in a terse two-sentence report on its official news agency.
Mr Chen swept to victory four years ago, ending more than five decades of Nationalist Party rule and marking Taiwan's first democratic transfer of power.
The Chinese nationalists. the Kuomintang (KMT) fled to Taiwan in 1949 after a bitter civil war.Taipei and Beijing have no official relations. China claims Taiwan is part of its territory and regularly insists that the two should be unified.
Analysts said it was unlikely that opposition parties or the Chinese government was behind the attack.
Mr Chen and Mr Lien Chan, his election opponent, agree on most basic issues involving China policy.
Neither favours immediate unification, and both are highly distrustful of the Communist leadership.
But Mr Chen has been more aggressive than his rival in pushing for a Taiwanese identity separate from China's, and this has raised tensions with Beijing.