By Teo Soh Lung
Two hundred days and the police at the Cantonment Police Complex have not completed their investigations into Cooling Off Day offences allegedly committed by me, Roy Ngerng and 2 Others. Our computers, notebooks, mobile phones, disk drives, hard disks, thumb drives etc costing thousands of dollars are still with the police. How long do they need to clone the disks and analyse the data which are totally irrelevant to the alleged offences? How long do they require to complete their investigations?
The police at the Cantonment Police Complex have now embarked on another investigation, this time under the Public Order Act. Like offences under the Parliamentary Elections Act, offences under this Act are also “arrestable.” I do not know if properties have already been seized from those alleged offenders. At least one of them has been interrogated.
I am amazed that despite Singapore’s boast as a first world country with super qualified police officers and state of the art forensic equipment, they require more than 200 days to investigate simple offences. None of us has denied doing what we did. Our defence is that we have the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression.
Outside the Cantonment Police Complex, we see huge, messy and ugly construction works in progress. It may take a few more years before these works are completed. It is likely that the police will take as much time as the completion of construction works to finish their investigations.
This is uniquely Singapore!
The Election Department had earlier filed police reports against Roy Ngerng Yiling and Teo Soh Lung for allegedly violating the parliament election act, by posting posts that promote candidates during the recent Bukit Batok By-election Cooling Off Day. (read here)
At the end of the police search at Teo’s home, the police seized one desktop computer, one laptop and one mobile phone belonging to Teo and they have yet to return the items.