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.
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