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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion