Is This The Smoking Gun?

The silence is deafening. A week has passed, and Prof Chan Kap Luk has yet to speak out on the events that led to the death of David Hartanto Widjaja.

In an interview with the Indonesian TV station, Media Nusantara Cinta, on Thursday 3rd March, Mr Widjaja’s father, Mr Hartanto Widjaja, said NTU had blocked him from seeing Prof Chan on the day of the incident. He made a request again two days later, which NTU also refused. NTU official response was that the professor was in recovery, and could not be disturbed.

Yet TODAY reported that Chan was in good spirits as he received visitors in his hospital room on Tuesday, one day after the incident. The lecturer told TODAY he was “good” but declined to say when he was returning to work.

For want of better inputs speculations run wild on the internet, bordering on the bizarre. Such as the one that the professor planned to hijack the results of Widjaja’s Final Year Project and claim as his own. It did not help when NTU “removed David’s data and his project” within 2 days of the alleged attack.

But the most damning piece of puzzle is the knife without a handle. Could any assailant make an effective stabbing assault without a handle to thrust the weapon? Photos taken at the site show a knife with a clean cloth wrapped around what would have been the handle. Then another photo shows the knife without a handle. The obvious lack of blood stains on the blade also begs more questions. Is this a simple case of evidence tampering, or just another instance of bungling by the Keystone Cops from the Ministry of Home Affairs, the folks who brought you the toilet escape of Mas Selamat Kastari?

Meanwhile the Sunday paper ran its own conspiracy theory, laying blame on War of Warcraft. Two full articles linked the death to the influence of online gaming violence, and for good measure, the short comings of a Singapore Armed Forces doctor gone A.W.O.L. and a 19-year-old sex offender were thrown in. Mercifully, Zhou Zheng, NTU project officer who hanged himself on Friday, was not labelled a game addict.

By todayinsingapore