Wednesday 10 June 2009

8 weeks jail for sedition


Ong Kian Cheong, 50, a SingTel technical officer, and his wife, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 46, a UBS associate director, were found guilty on May 28 of four charges of sedition after an 11-day trial

1 comment:

Guanyu said...

8 weeks jail for sedition

10 June 2009

A couple found guilty last month for distributing seditious or objectionable publications, were sentenced to eight weeks jail each on Wednesday.

Ong Kian Cheong, 50, a SingTel technical officer, and his wife, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 46, a UBS associate director, were found guilty on May 28 of four charges of sedition after an 11-day trial.

They had distributed two publications, The Little Bride and Who Is Allah?, to two Muslims, which tended to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims in Singapore.

They were also found to have distributed The Little Bride to another Muslim in 2007, even though they knew the publication was likely to cause feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between the two religious groups.

The couple were also found to have had 439 copies of 11 seditious tracts at their Maplewoods condominium in Bukit Timah on Jan 30 last year, the day of their arrest.

Over two decades, Ong and Chan, who had attended the Berean Christian Church in Havelock Road, distributed over 20,000 evangelistic tracts to the public.

In their defence, they claimed ignorance, saying they did not know the contents of the tracts and had no reason to believe they had a seditious tendency.

This 11-day trial is the first time a full trial was heard under the Sedition Act.

In 2005, a man was jailed a month for posting inflammatory and vicious remarks about Muslims and Malays on the Internet.

The following year, a 21-year-old accounts assistant received a stern warning for posting an offensive cartoon of Jesus Christ on his blog.