This is a testament at how foggy my memory has been as of late. I remember one day after class last week, I was leaving my Chinese classes at National Taiwan University. I was talking on the phone, and all I remember saying was, "That's strange, there's a lot of police around that building." The only reason I remember it is that I was thinking about the shootings at VA Tech.

You would think I would remember seeing SWAT team members in front of a building.

In any case, I mostly let it go because I had other things on my mind, but it turns out there was a drill to test the Taipei police departments reaction to a "terrorist" event:

Two days after the worst shooting rampage in US history on the campus of Virginia Tech University, heavily armed police swarmed the university's sister school in Taiwan, National Taiwan University (NTU), responding to what they believed was a hostage crisis involving two armed assailants. What police and students didn't know, however, was that the incident was a stunt staged by two elected officials who had not notified the police of their intent.

Around 2:45pm on Wednesday, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators Lee Chen-nan and Lin Kuo-ching led several officials from the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the media to the university, where they then announced that they would conduct a 'drill.'

The pair alerted campus police that two gun-toting madmen had just taken 30 students hostage in a classroom at the university's College of Bio-Resources and Agriculture.

After receiving the initial report, the university police sent two officers to check on the situation, while calling for backup from the Taipei City Police Department.

This involved a bus load of politicians, media, the police, the university security, and someone barging into a room with a fork in his hand, telling the students to imagine it was a machine gun.
The politicians who organized the hubbub are coming under some fairly angry criticism:

Asked if the education ministry had violated procedures on holding such security drills, Lee said, 'No, we were in line with the relevant rules and regulations.'

But the raucus drill threw the campus into disarray amid mid-semester examinations, Fu said, adding that students had complained en masse.

'We're happy to cooperate with the education ministry in staging such drills. But we probably won't accomodate legislators in such a fashion ever again,' Fu said.

'Once was enough,' he added.

The impromptu drill quickly drew criticism from all quarters.

Premier Su Tseng-chang, himself a member of the DPP, vowed to file criminal charges against the two lawmakers.

'The premier said that he is very angry about this behavior by DPP lawmakers, and has asked related law enforcement offices to begin an investigation of the case immediately,' said Cabinet spokeswoman Chen Mei-ling.

'What they did caused a commotion on the campus and made a lot of people scared. It was really unnecessary,' she said.

Now, I'm all for running drills to make sure we're all up to snuff with the best safety measures possible, but what I don't get is why this has anything to do with NTU being a sister school of VA Tech:

The Ministry of Education is, of course, our commanding administrative agency,' Fu said, adding, 'Our first reaction was that our sister school, Virgina Tech, had just experienced this horrible tragedy, and we're concerned about our own campus safety, so we gave our consent.'

Is this sort of violence more prone to spreading from sister school to sister school?