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Boyfriend of alleged rape victim encouraged her to attend late-night party

SINGAPORE — She was reluctant to go to Zouk club on the night she was allegedly raped, but her boyfriend convinced her to go since it was a farewell gathering for one of her colleagues.

SINGAPORE — She was reluctant to go to Zouk club on the night she was allegedly raped, but her boyfriend convinced her to go since it was a farewell gathering for one of her colleagues.

This detail was revealed in court yesterday by the woman’s boyfriend, 28, who testified on the fourth day of a trial against 40-year-old Ong Soon Heng.

Ong is accused of abducting and raping the woman, then 22, at his house in July 2014.

That night, the boyfriend did not hear from the woman after 3am on July 24 and started getting frantic.

Using the “Find My iPhone” mobile application to track her, he was led to Hume Heights near Upper Bukit Timah where Ong was.

The upsetting scene that greeted him there: His girlfriend lying in “an unresponsive state”, with Ong next to her on the same bed.

Earlier that night, the woman was reluctant to head for the farewell party. Her boyfriend told her that there would be “other girls around” and told her to go. He also said that another part-time worker from her team, who was relatively new, might feel uncomfortable, and her presence might make things less awkward. He told her to “be safe” and to “keep (him) updated”.

It was around 12.30am that the woman, who was serving her internship at an eatery, agreed to head out to the nightclub.

Throughout the wee hours of that morning, right up to about 3.15am, the woman and her boyfriend kept in contact by texting each other on their phones. The boyfriend told the court that at 5am, he tried contacting her a total of seven times, but there was no response.

Close to 6am, he decided to use the mobile app to find her. He said he could log into her account because they “shared common passwords with each other”.

When “Hume Heights” appeared on the app, he said it was “an unfamiliar location” to him. Arriving at a carpark there, he spotted a Daihatsu car and recognised it as belonging to Ong.

He told the court that he had heard of Ong, but had not met him in person before. He determined that it was Ong’s car because his girlfriend had told him that Ong had lent her the car to drive on a few occasions when Ong was out of town. The boyfriend consented to it “to allow her to practise her driving”.

The woman got to know Ong, a bunker surveyor and a divorcee, because he was friends with the owners of the eatery where she worked, and he went there occasionally.

Near the Hume Heights carpark, the boyfriend saw a row of five single-storey colonial bungalows and walked towards them. Then, he saw something at one of the house doors. “What caught my attention was (my girlfriend’s) pair of black shoes,” he told the court. “I knew that she was inside.”

After knocking on the door for some five minutes, a man — believed to be Ong’s housemate — answered and asked the boyfriend who he was, and what he wanted.

When he replied to say he saw his girlfriend’s shoes, that man “became panicky thereafter”, and after looking into the house at one particular room, told him that Ong was not in.

The boyfriend went into the house anyway and into the room. Opening the door, he saw that the room was dark and turned on the lights. That was when he saw his girlfriend and Ong under the same blanket.

The boyfriend said that Ong immediately got up and the first thing he said was: “I did not do anything to her.”

Pulling down the blanket covering the victim, her boyfriend realised she was in a green T-shirt and patterned shorts, both of which he knew she never owned. Her dress and an accompanying belt were hung elsewhere in the room.

When asked why she was dressed like that, Ong apparently said that she had vomited on her dress, but the boyfriend said that her dress was still clean, with no vomit stains on it. Ong had no response to that, the court heard.

Ong was also asked a series of questions by the victim’s boyfriend, but was said to have appeared “panicky” and had no answers for some of them.

Throughout the exchanges, the victim remained in a drunken, unconscious state. Her boyfriend tried to rouse her to no avail.

He then carried her into his van, and she did not stir throughout the whole trip home even though he tried to wake her up.

She continued to sleep at her parents’ home, and in hospital later that day, he said that she woke just once to say “I’m tired” before sleeping again.

Cross-examining the boyfriend, the defence, led by lawyer Peter Fernando, sought to paint a different picture of the relationship between Ong and the woman.

Mr Fernando said that Ong would send her back from work, or to work, and Ong texted her on her phone to say he would “want her to be his girlfriend if she wasn’t attached”.

The victim’s boyfriend said some of these details were made known to him when he asked her “to come clean” about the incident.

Both the boyfriend and the woman cannot be named due to a court order. The trial continues today.

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