Comparing Tan & Teo’s interrogations:
Rampant abuse & intimidation; Was Teo really released at 4am? Or actually held overnight like Tan?
Firstly, don’t forget the gathering at the Kelana Jaya Stadium, 4.30pm, Sunday 18th July to commemorate Teo Beng Hock’s passing.
One of the strange aspects of the story is why Teo would have decided to stay on in a place where he was made to endure such a terrible experience, even at 4am.
The testimony of Tan Boon Hwa, who I think is the last known person to have seen Teo alive, is revealing. Three things worthy of note: how abusive his own interrogation was, the fact that he was held overnight, and his observations of Teo at 6am:
Tan said that the two officers who questioned him tried to extract false confession from him, pressuring him to deny that he supplied 1,500 national flags for a Merdeka function at the Sri Kembangan state constituency.
During the interrogation, Tan said the officers used the ‘good cop, bad cop’ technique; initially being polite but later switching to verbally abusing him and making him to stand for four hours between 10pm to 2am.
Tan was questioned on the same day Teoh Beng Hock, the political secretary to Selangor executive councillor Ean Yong Hean Wah, was also interrogated by MACC.
According to Tan, he was threatened with physical violence, with one officer pointing to his forehead and allegedly saying, “You don’t lie. This is my place. I can hit you. Believe me!“
During interrogations, he said other officers would randomly walk into the room to mock his poor command of Bahasa Malaysia and used derogatory terms such as “Cina bodoh” (stupid Chinese) and asked him if he was a Chinese citizen.
The worst intimidation, Tan said, were threats to his family which he described as “mental torture“.
“They said that if I don’t ‘tell the truth’, they will take away my wife and there would be no one to care for the children. But I did not give in,” said Tan, during a press conference at the Selangor state secretariat today.
He was allowed to sleep on the carpeted floor and the interrogation continued the following morning.
