Afro Asia Building 2011 fire: Man avoids gallows after murder charge reduced
TODAY file photo
SINGAPORE — A 71-year-old former customs officer escaped the gallows after he was convicted of a reduced charge of culpable homicide today (Feb 16), bringing closure to a high profile case in 2011, where a woman’s badly burnt body was found following a blaze, at the Afro Asia Building at Robinson Road.
Govindasamy Nallaiah was previously charged with murder under Section 300(d) of the Penal Code, which carries the maximum punishment of a death sentence or life imprisonment and caning. But Govindasamy cannot be caned as he is more than 50 years old. Under the reduced charge, he faces a maximum jail term of 10 years and a fine.
Low Foong Meng was killed in the fire at the office of her lawyer husband Rengarajoo Rengasamy Balasamy, to whom Govindasamy had owed more than S$38,000 in legal fees for defending him in a corruption trial.
Delivering her verdict, Judicial Commissioner (JC) Hoo Sheau Peng said she could not agree with the prosecution’s case that the fire, started by Govindasamy after he knocked Low out, would be “so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death”.
JC Hoo also noted that Section 300(d) of the Penal Code is “very rarely invoked”, with no known case of a conviction that is based on this provision in Singapore. The section states that murder is committed “if the person committing the act knows that it is so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death, or such bodily injury as is likely to cause death, and commits such act without any excuse for incurring the risk of causing death, or such injury as aforesaid”.
During the trial, which started in October last year, the court heard that the day of the incident — Aug 10, 2011 — was Govindasamy’s deadline to pay up, or Mr Rengarajoo would enforce a court order to seize and sell his son’s house. Mr Rengarajoo, whom Govindasamy had known since they were 15, defended him in a 2002 corruption trial.
The prosecution made their case that Govindasamy had tried to negotiate the settlement of his debt with Low that morning, after which he took out a bicycle chain and padlock from his black haversack, and knocked her out. Before fleeing the scene, he set fire to some documents on a nearby table, starting the blaze that killed Low.
JC Hoo, however, said she could not agree with the prosecution that after Govindasamy rendered Low unconscious, his manner of setting the fire would have produced “a fire that spread so quickly and widely and/or burnt so furiously that death would have been a practical certainty”. There was no evidence that he had used accelerants and that the fire only started in one place, with no evidence to show that Govindasamy had set fire to everything around him indiscriminately.
While the prosecution also made the case that the office building was effectively a “fire trap”, JC Hoo said there was no evidence that there were any obstacles in the way of the escape route, nor that Govindasamy “sought to further restrain, constrain or confine” the deceased in any way in the office.
She also noted that at the time the fire was started, Low’s injuries had not been fatal and she was not immobilised. Instead, the judge accepted the defence’s argument that Low could have moved after she was knocked out, where she survived for at least 20 minutes after the fire was started, and was sufficiently conscious at two points to scream.
Speaking to the media after her father’s conviction, Ms Letchmi Govindasamy, 45, said she was happy with the verdict and hoped for the best in his sentencing, which is expected to take place at a later date.
