Woman who mailed tracts did not know they were objectionable
By
Elena Chong
Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 45, said she did not know that The Little Bride had a tendency to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims in Singapore. -- ST PHOTO: WONG KWAI CHOW
AN ASSOCIATE director of a bank who is accused of distributing seditious and objectionable materials to three Muslims said she did not know or had reason to believe that an evangelistic tract she sent out was objectionable.
Testifying in her defence on Monday, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 45, said neither did she know that The Little Bride had a tendency to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims in Singapore.
She said she did not know that the American-published booklet dealt with religion in such a manner that was likely to cause feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between the two religious groups.
From 2004, she said she had not read the contents of the tracts she had mailed out to recipients from the phone directory randomly.
Neither did she show them to her husband, Ong Kian Cheong, 48, a SingTel technical officer.
Chan said at first, the tracts were put into the letter boxes of residents at Housing Board blocks.
Subsequently in the late 1990s, she started mailing them out in envelopes.
She wrote the names and addresses on the envelopes and put the tracts in before mailing them.
Her aim was to sow the Gospel seed and let recipients come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, she said.
She and Ong are accused of distributing the seditious publication, The Little Bride, to Mr Irwan Ariffin in October 2007, and the same objectionable booklet to Ms Farhati Ahmad seven months earlier in March.
They are also said to have distributed another seditious publication, Who is Allah?, to Mr Isa Raffee in December that year.
The last charge accuses them of having 11 titles of seditious publications totalling 439 copies at their Maplewoods condominium on the day of their arrest on Jan 30 last year.
