Little India riots: Last Indian national goes on trial in Singapore

Singapore: The trial of the last Indian national, out of the 25 accused from the country in the December 2013 riot case in Singapore, has begun with his defence lawyer claiming “wrongful arrest” and “racial profiling” of his client. The prosecution has alleged that Arun Kaliamurthy, 29, had failed to disperse from the riot-hit area in the Little India precinct, when commanded by a police officer to do so, The Straits Times reported on Tuesday. [caption id=“attachment_2216312” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File photo of the Singapore riots. AP[/caption] Arun, who holds a master’s degree in information system, has claimed trial and is the last of the 25 people to be charged relating to the 8 December riot, country’s worst street violence in 40 years. Twenty-five Indian nationals were charged for the riot, which left 23 emergency vehicles damaged or set on fire and 43 enforcement officers injured. The riot was sparked by a fatal accident involving an Indian national and a local bus. Some of the 25 persons, including Arun, had their charges amended to failure to disperse and causing obstruction to police. All others have been convicted and sentenced to jail, some with caning. Beginning the trial yesterday, the prosecution called six witnesses to the stand, five of them were police officers and one was  run’s housemate. Several officers testified, their teams had tried to “flush out” rioters from the vicinity of Race Course Road beginning shortly after 10 pm on the Sunday night of 8 December, yelling out commands in the four major languages for people to disperse. The court was shown a video recorded on Arun’s mobile phone, showing burning vehicles and the mob cheering, which the police ascertained had been taken at about 10.50 pm near Kerbau Road, an area of the riot, the police had been trying to clear. Commands for the crowd to disperse could be heard clearly in the video. The prosecution believes Arun “knowingly continued in an assembly of five or more persons likely to cause a disturbances of the public peace”, in the vicinity of the riot area of Race Course Road and Kerbau Road, despite police command to leave on that day. But in his cross-examination of the witnesses, Arun’s lawyer Shashi Nathan claimed that his client had been “wrongfully arrested”, and that he could have been targeted based on “racial profiling”. Nathan accused the police of potentially having focussed on Arun, then living in a rented room in Little India while looking for a job, because of his race. The lawyer pointed out that his client was arrested only later and “quite some distance away” from the main area of chaos. “Why was this the case? Was it because he was Indian?” the newspaper quoted Nathan as saying. But Deputy Public Prosecutor Sellakumaran Sellamuthoo objected to the line of questioning. “The issues is…whether or not he failed to disperse from the assembly…when the SOC (Special Operations Command) officers arrived and tried to flush down (the area) at about 10.20 pm,” the DPP said. PTI