Two of the four former SMRT bus drivers who were in late
November charged for their involvement in
a strike over unequal pay have
spoken up of physical abuse by their interrogators.
Speaking in
taped interviews to documentary
filmmaker Lynn Lee on 9 January, 32-year-old He Jun Ling, who
faces two charges for engaging
in a conspiracy to incite an illegal strike, said he was punched in
the stomach by a police officer during his interrogation.
“They locked me in a small room,” he says in Mandarin in
the video clip, which Lee
uploaded to video platform Vimeo on Monday evening. “At the time, a
police officer handcuffed me, and after that he punched me in the
stomach.”
In
a separate interview,
33-year-old Liu Xiangying was recorded saying that a police officer
had threatened to bury him alive, where “no one will be able to
find (him)”. According to He and Liu himself, the latter was
slapped many times by his interrogators.
“He (the interrogation officer) said, ‘Do you know I can dig a hole
and bury you? No one will be able to find you.’ Those were the
police’s actual words,” he said. In another instance, Liu said the
officer told him “I have ways to make you confess”.
“I said, what do you want me to confess? All I’m saying is what I
did on the 26th (the day the strike occurred) and who I talked to,
because he was asking me about the 26th and I told them who was
present then. He didn’t believe me,” he added.
Liu also said he was asked if he knew He, and when he said he did
not, he was slapped repeatedly on the left side, behind his neck
and shoulder blades.
“I said I don’t know him (He). Because I didn’t know He Jun Ling he
beat me. He said ‘You know him!’; I said, ‘I don’t’, and then he
hit me,” he said. “He hit me hard. If he wasn’t using a lot of
force, He Jun Ling wouldn’t have heard it.”
Lee, who spoke to all four of the drivers as part of research she
was doing for a documentary, said in a blog post on her website
that she felt compelled to share the clips from the interviews she
did with He and Liu, as they are “serious allegations that need to
be addressed urgently”.
Speaking to Yahoo! Singapore on Tuesday morning, she said
she had written to the
Singapore Prison Service,
seeking a response to the drivers’ allegations, but had yet to hear
back from them.
“I think everyone will agree that it is unacceptable for the police
to hit anyone,” she said, adding that she had reason to believe
that they were not lying because they were interviewed separately,
at different times, and were not present at each other’s
interviews.
“I hope the relevant authorities will respond,” she said. “It will
be good to hear from them.”
When contacted for comment, a police spokesperson acknowledged the
seriousness of the accusations He and Liu had made.
“They should file a police report so that we can investigate into
them. Their lawyers can also raise this matter in court when the
case against them is heard,” she said.
Lawyers acting for He have not yet said whether they plan to
contest the voluntariness of the drivers' statements given in
court, should they go to trial.
The four are next expected in court for a pre-trial conference on
Friday afternoon.
Watch the interviews here:
Source:
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/charged-bus-drivers-allege-%E2%80%9Cslapping--punching%E2%80%9D-by-police-033810625.html
