Former SIA pilot fined for forwarding photo of dead maid on WhatsApp
Fazli Hisham Mohd Fairuz Shah was found guilty of offences under the Official Secrets Act after he forwarded a photo of a dead maid which he had received from his paramedic girlfriend. (Photo: Raj Nadarajan/TODAY)
SINGAPORE: A former Singapore Airlines (SIA) pilot was fined S$3,000 on Monday (Sep 2) for forwarding a photo of a dead foreign domestic worker, which his paramedic girlfriend had sent to him.
Fazli Hisham Mohd Fairuz Shah, 29, had been found guilty last week of two offences under the Official Secrets Act (OSA).
The charges relate to the photo of the maid, who had hanged herself from a fan, and a second picture of a related document taken by Fazli's girlfriend Nurizzah Afiqah Hussain.
His lawyer had asked for a fine of not more than S$1,000 per charge, saying his client had been punished by having lost his job.Â
Fazli was fined the same amount as Nurizzah, who was sentenced in August last year.
Nurizzah was working for private ambulance operator Unistrong Technology, which did outsourced work from the Singapore Civil Defence Force, when she went to the scene of the death on Feb 1, 2017.
She shone a torchlight on the woman while an ambulance driver took a photo of the body with his mobile phone.
She later forwarded this photo to her boyfriend Fazli, along with another photo she took of a document that read "Maid hung herself on the fan".
When Fazli received the photos, he forwarded them to another chat group containing 31 members.
The photos began circulating online and a maid posted them on her Facebook account.
The deceased maid's agent got wind of the photos and informed her employer, who called the police.
The ambulance driver, Shaik Haziq Fahmi Shaik Nasair Johar, was fined $$1,500 last September.
Fazli could have been jailed for up to two years and fined a maximum of S$2,000 for each charge under the OSA.
