Lo Hwei Yen came from a country that prides itself on rigorous anti-terrorism measures.
But all the security in the city-state of Singapore meant nothing when Islamic militants stormed the Indian hotel where Lo was staying and took her hostage.
“It’s pretty unthinkable. No one expects a Singaporean to ...” Lo’s younger sister, Hwei Shan, 25, was quoted as saying yesterday in the New Paper, her words trailing off.
“This is the first time a Singaporean has been a victim of a terrorist attack,” Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) said in a letter to Lo’s husband, Michael Puhaindran.
A Singaporean foreign ministry official announced late on Friday that Lo, 28, had died after militants took her and others hostage at the Oberoi/Trident hotel in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai.
Local newspapers reported yesterday that Lo, a lawyer, had gone to Mumbai for just one night to attend a seminar.
“She was supposed to come back on Thursday evening,” the New Paper quoted her sister as saying.
Hwei Shan told the Straits Times that Lo called her husband at 2am on Thursday to say she heard gunfire and hotel staff told her to move to another floor.
At about 6am, she called again to say she had been taken hostage and was not heard from after that, the newspapers said.
Jai Sohan, consular director of Singapore’s foreign ministry, told reporters on Friday night that Lo had conveyed a message from the attackers.
“The terrorists demanded that the Indian authorities refrain from storming the Oberoi hotel or else they would harm her,” Sohan said.
The demand was passed on to Indian authorities, he said, unable to give details on exactly how she died.
“Our whole family loved her,” Lo’s father-in-law, Stanley Puhaindran, told the New Paper.
Puhaindran, a justice of the peace, presided over her wedding on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali last year, the paper said.
At Puhaindran’s simple home in a Singapore public housing compound, a woman told Agence France-Presse yesterday that Puhaindran could not comment.
“He’s not thinking very well,” she said, fighting back tears. “Give us some time.”
Sohan said that Lo’s husband identified her body.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS