She was among the morning crowd walking towards Ang Mo Kio MRT station at about 8am yesterday when she came across a shocking sight.
A man was lying on the floor of a covered walkway, bleeding profusely from his chest while another man was crying and sitting by his side.
Near them was a knife with a 20cm-long blade with blood on it.
Madam Connie Loh, a 61-year-old retiree, told The New Paper: “I heard him (the crying man) say in Mandarin, ‘Please I’m begging you, don’t let anything happen to you. I love you.’”
After a while, he lit a cigarette, tossed his lighter on the ground and started smoking, she added.
The man, who also appeared to be injured, was later arrested by the police. He was placed on a stretcher before he was taken away, Madam Loh said.
The victim, who had stab wounds on his arm and back, died in hospital.
TNP also understands he was Mr Tan Chin Siong, 48.
TNP understands that the suspect and the victim are not related.
The incident occurred at the covered walkway that runs from Ang Mo Kio MRT Station along the edge of the Ang Mo Kio Town Garden East park towards the Cheng San Community Club.
A cleaner, Mr Salauddin Habibulah, 29, said he was working at the void deck of Block 512, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 8, at about 8am when he heard a loud argument between two men at the nearby covered walkway.
He did not bother to check it out and carried on with his work.
CURIOUS
When he later saw police cars parked in the area, curiosity got the better of him.
“When I went over to take a look, a man was lying on the floor and there was a lot of blood coming out from his chest,” he said.
Paramedics were tending to him as another man sat some distance away. Mr Salauddin also said that he saw a knife nearby on the floor.
A man who lives at a nearby block told TNP that he was exercising in the park when he heard a commotion.
When he got to the scene, a woman was performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the victim before the paramedics arrived.
A resident at nearby Block 596, Madam H. H. Wong, 33, was on her way to work at around 8.05am when she saw police officers running.
Curious, she followed them and at the covered walkway near the Ang Mo Kio 3G Centre, she saw two men, one soaked in blood, surrounded by police and paramedics.
“At first, I thought that the two men were dead, but I realised that the other man was alive. He was lying dazed on the ground as paramedics checked him for injuries,” Madam Wong said.
Chinese newspaper Shin Min Daily News reported that the police cordoned off an area about the size of a football field, including the covered walkway and a section of the park.
When TNP reached the scene at 10am, the police were diverting pedestrians from the walkway, which residents use to get to the nearby blocks.
A police spokesman said the victim, a 48-year-old man, was taken to Tan Tock Seng Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.
A 39-year-old man was arrested in connection with the case and will be charged with murder today. If convicted, he faces the death penalty.
This is the third reported murder in less than a week.
In the first case in the early hours of Monday, a man was found dead in his Bukit Panjang flat and his wife has been charged with his murder.
On Thursday, a woman was found dead in a multi-storey carpark in Toa Payoh. A man was arrested and is due to be charged today with her murder.
Two ex-cops said that such a situation is extremely rare.
Mr Luke Lee, 62, a former police investigator who is now a lawyer, said: “I’ve never seen three murders in a week. In my division, we usually had murders once a month.”
Former detective Dave Chan, 68, who is now an operation executive at Fuji Trading Singapore, said: “In this era, it is rare to find three murders in a week.”
