Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Mistery behind David's death

10 days have passed since the news media reported that David Hartanto Widjaja (21), an Indonesian student at the Nanyang Technology University (NTU) Singapore, committed suicide after stabbing an Associate Professor.

But until now, the case is still a mystery because 5 days after the tragedy, a Chinese national working on an NTU project i.e. Zhou Zheng(24), was found hanged on the campus. This that the fact that he and David shared the same laboratory have led to speculations about possible connections between the two suicide cases.
Beside that, there has been growing doubts in the blogosphere on the reliability of the reports made by the Singapore based news media.
Sgpolitics.net wrote that Today, Channel News Asia, Asia One and the Strait Times have misrepresented critical information in their stories which led to distortion of the truth about David's death. Here is his elaboration:
Edwin i.e David's friend and some other Indonesian students on the night of the incident had spoken to David’s parents who told him that they had seen the body and found no wounds on David’s wrists. This means that media reports about the wrist wounds were untrue.
Edwin also quoted the parents as saying that there is a slash wound on the neck
David's brother, William, said that the Police told him that there is no wrist wound and also told him not to trust the news media.
NTU's official press release said that David had fallen off the building, but Channel News Asia reported that he jumped off the building!
OMY reported that David had attempted two suicides, but no concrete facts mentioned.
The Straits Times reported vividly about how the struggle took place based on
testimonies of friends of Associate Professor Chan Kap Luk, including what
happened in the professor’s room, how David had stabbed him in the back, and the struggle that followed. But names of those witnesses were not mentioned.

According to Tempo, an alumni of NTU i.e. Margaretta, Indonesian, wrote in her blog that NTU students who are not Singapore citizens are forced to work extra hard to upheld NTU's image, e.g by creating patentable invention, etc.

Considering the above, The Jakarta Post reported that the Indonesian government, through its Foreign Department Spokesman Teuku Faizasyah, has requested the Singapore authorities to speed up their investigation on David's death.

I hope that the Singapore authorities would pay serious attention on this matter and the Singapore news media would seriously review their reports on what actually happened to David Hartanto Widjaja, so that justice shall prevail.

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