Tan Pwee Sin is no stranger to the punishments doled out by the legal system in Singapore. He’s seen the inside of a prison cell multiple times since 1983, and his last jail stint was 14 years for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The 67-year-old had been slapped with a life sentence in 1996 after killing a 79-year-old neighbor with a metal bar, but he was released from prison in 2010, reported The Straits Times.
Unfortunately, instead of learning the error of his ways, Tan returned to court on Tuesday (Aug 29) and was charged with killing his neighbor’s cat with a carving knife. He pleaded guilty to one count of animal cruelty, one count of criminal intimidation and one count of receiving stolen property, according to Channel NewsAsia.
Apparently, Tan and his 31-year-old neighbor Muhammad Bakhtiyar Jaffar were involved in several disagreements before it all culminated in Tan fatally slashing the man’s Russian Blue cat, Vamp, on Jan 30 this year. Both men lived in flats a couple units away from each other on the eighth storey of a block on Spooner Road near Jalan Bukit Merah.
Bakhtiyar, who had another Russian Blue feline, was unhappy with Tan feeding Vamp, as that prevented the cat from eating the “high-quality cat food” his owner bought. So Tan challenged Bakhtiyar to a fight and bragged that he had spent time in jail for stabbing someone to death.
All that brewing discontent reached its peak when Tan spotted Vamp mating with one of his three cats around midnight on Jan 29. Furious, he stomped his foot to chase the cat off, but it returned and started mating again. So he reached for his carving knife with a 36cm-long blade and slashed Vamp’s abdomen, exposing its intestines.
A couple who lived nearby found the cat lying in a pool of blood at a staircase landing and alerted Bakhtiyar. The police were called in and the cat was taken to Mount Pleasant’s After Hours Emergency Clinic, where a vet provided stabilization treatment, flushed and bandaged the wound, and administered pain relief.
Mount Pleasant said it made attempts to contact Bakhtiyar to have him visit Vamp at the clinic and discuss surgery and the cat’s chance of survival, but he did not turn up.
The neighbors discharged Vamp the next day to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It died in the afternoon.
Initially, Tan denied his actions when officers questioned him. However, Bakhtiyar found the murder weapon in the ground floor bin chute and Tan finally confessed to Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority investigators when Bakhtiyar informed the police about his discovery.
More than a month later, Tan also imposed a threat on Bakhtiyar’s 11-year-old nephew when the boy asked for Bakhtiyar’s cat back after he saw Tan playing with it. Tan warned the boy that “I will cut your neck and throw you downstairs from the building.”
Terrified, the boy told his uncle about the incident, and Bakhtiyar called the police to report Tan, who was eventually arrested for criminal intimidation.
Besides all this, Tan was also found to have dishonestly retained stolen properly — about $6,950 in cash — from anonymous sources connected to a police impersonation scam on Oct 10 last year.
A psychiatric report showed that Tan displayed anti-social personality traits, with a low “threshold for anger” and “reckless disregard for the safety of others”.
Tan will be sentenced on Sept 19.
Editor’s note: The article was edited to clarify the actions on the part of Mount Pleasant.
