SINGAPORE — The Online Citizen (TOC) has refuted Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam’s accusations that it had orchestrated a campaign to smear the police’s reputation over teenager Benjamin Lim’s case, pointing out it did not write most of the 25 articles about the case that were published on the sociopolitical website.

The TOC said the authorities had not responded to its queries on the case, adding that any inaccuracy in its reports were inevitable given the lack of information on the case, and there was no deliberate attempt to mislead.

Out of the 25 articles posted on the website relating to the 14-year-old’s death on Jan 26, and discussion on police procedures, only four were “written in-house”, the TOC said in a post on Wednesday (March 2). The other articles were “letters and opinion pieces” contributed by members of the public.

“Questions were raised and people wanted answers,” the TOC said. “Their reactions were spontaneous. It was hardly an ‘orchestrated campaign’.”

In his ministerial statement on Benjamin’s death in Parliament on Tuesday, Mr Shanmugam hit out at the “many falsehoods” perpetuated by various parties.

Among other things, he took issue with a TOC article titled “Student said plainclothes officers at school wore tee-shirts with ‘Police’ at its back”, which was published on its website on Feb 5.

Mr Shanmugan said the police officers who went to Benjamin’s school were in plainclothes, without any police markings.

In its response, the TOC said with regard to its Feb 5 article, the website made “the additional effort” to reach out to a Facebook user who had left a comment on the Singapore Police Force’s Facebook page.

The Facebook user — a parent of a student in Benjamin’s school identified as Mary Anne Pereira — told TOC that her son had seen men with the word “POLICE” at the back of their tee-shirts on the day the teenager was picked up by the police.

It added that before publishing the article, the TOC had reached out to the police, other officials and Mr Shanmugam.

“However, we did not receive any reply. We are thus puzzled as to why Mr (Shanmugam) would label the article ‘dishonest’,” said the post.

In a separate interview with TODAY on Tuesday following Mr Shanmugam’s statement, TOC’s chief editor Terry Xu also said he had sent questions to the police, police commissioner and Ang Mo Kio division police officers. “But basically no one … in the police force actually wrote back to me to hold the story because it’s falsehood,” he added.

According to the TOC post, till Tuesday’s parliamentary session, “no official” from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) or the Ministry of Law (MinLaw) “attempted to clarify the matter with TOC”.

“We would have run any updates, facts or clarifications the Home Affairs or Law Ministry would have provided us with,” it said.

Mr Shanmugam told Parliament that the police “out of respect for the Coroner’s Inquiry process, were right in not responding” to allegations relating to the case.

“TOC and some others have ignored the pending Coroner’s inquiry, and have made wild allegations in this matter,” he added.

TOC said on Wednesday: “Mr Shanmugam has chosen to characterise our efforts at reaching out as ‘tactics’ to get the police to comment on Benjamin’s case. This is not correct. We believe in giving all sides a chance to speak.”

The TOC also pointed out that “inaccuracies” are not the same as “falsehoods”.

“Given the dearth of information available to us, it is natural that some of our reports were not fully accurate ... We are happy to correct any mistakes we might have made in our articles,” it added.“However, the word ‘falsehoods’ implies a deliberate attempt to mislead. TOC rejects any such suggestion.”

At 10.15pm on Wednesday, the TOC editorial had attracted some 1,700 ‘likes’ and about 50 comments on its website, while its Facebook post sharing the same article had nearly 450 ‘likes’ and about 280 shares. ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SIAU MING EN