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Jail for man who wanted cops in Benjamin Lim case killed

SINGAPORE — A man has been jailed six months for urging people to kill the police officers who sought out Benjamin Lim for questioning in school on Facebook, as well as other similar posts against public officers.

SINGAPORE — A man has been jailed six months for urging people to kill the police officers who sought out Benjamin Lim for questioning in school on Facebook, as well as other similar posts against public officers.  

Chia Choon Kiat, 41, who does online marketing, had pleaded guilty to three charges of communicating an electronic record containing an incitement to violence between January and February. Another five similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing. Calling himself “Rambo Power” on Facebook, Chia is also the account-holder and administrator of a Facebook page called “Cigarette Butt 
Warriors”.

In February, writing as Rambo Power on Facebook, he said: “When people buay lun (Hokkien for cannot endure) already … will need to take matters into our own hands. Please reveal the identity of the 5 plainclothes officers and we go handle them ourselves. Kill them.”

Chia was referring to the case of Benjamin, who killed himself after being questioned by the police for allegedly molesting a girl.

The police were alerted to the post on Feb 5, via an article the All Singapore Stuff Facebook page, which pointed to the post by a “raging netizen” who was “encouraging violence against the police”.

Prior to this, Chia also made similar remarks against National Environment Agency (NEA) enforcement officers on two occasions in January. 

Chia, who was fined about 10 years ago by an NEA officer for throwing a cigarette butt into a drain, has been engaged in an online hate campaign against these officers since Dec 13 last year, investigations found. On Jan 24, he wrote on Facebook that to “play or beat up a government uniformed officer”, one could follow them to their homes or target their families.

Five days later, he wrote on the Cigarette Butt Warriors Facebook page that consisted of a graphic video depicting the ritualistic killing of a pig, where the animal was repeatedly hit on its head with a hammer before being stabbed in the neck. The post was accompanied with the comment: “Let’s do this to NEA Cigarette Butt Officers”.

Urging the court to impose a six-month sentence, Deputy Public Prosecutor Sanjiv Vaswani said Chia’s consistent act of making such Facebook posts reflected his escalating behaviour to incite violence. Chia was also not of unsound mind and knew what he was doing, added the prosecutor.

Chia’s lawyer Alfred Dodwell did not challenge the sentence the prosecution sought, but noted that his client suffers from a form of “mental aberration” that causes him to hold “overvalued ideas”. For instance, in the post he made on Benjamin, Mr Dodwell said his client “simply got caught up and posted his thoughts in an unfiltered impulsive way”.

Delivering the sentence, district judge Crystal Ong said Chia’s case was a timely reminder for all who have a social media presence to be circumspect about what they choose to post online. 

Sharing views on a matter is one thing, but asking for the identity of the officers involved to be revealed so that they could be killed is another, she said. “The sentence imposed has to be such that it would deter others from making incendiary statements online, where they can reach masses within a short period of time,” she added. 

She did not accord much mitigating weight to Chia’s “mental aberration”, adding that the psychiatrist Chia saw did not go so far as to say that this was a psychiatric condition that could have caused the offences. Chia could have been jailed up to five years and fined for each charge. 

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