Tan Chay Wa's tombstone trial

His older brother Tan Chu Boon was arrested and charged on suspicion that he designed an elaborate but 'subversive' tombstone, which had engraved on it words glorifying the communist cause.

[1] The Malayan National Liberation Front (MNLF), an organisation of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), was formed in 1968 to support the overthrow of the governments of Singapore and Malaysia.

[2] The MNLF was also involved in collecting supplies such as medicine, explosives and assorted equipment for the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), which was the military arm of the CPM operating in the border area of northern Malaysia and southern Thailand.

Twenty-three members were released after interrogation, seventeen were detained without trial under the Internal Security Act (ISA) and ten turned over to the Malaysian police for suspected involvement in terrorist activities in Malaysia.

[2] Tan Chay Wa (1948–1983), a political dissident and a senior official of the MNLF, managed to escape from Singapore to Malaysia as the ISD officers closed in on him.

[4] At his November 1983 trial, Chu Boon argued in court that he was neither a communist nor did he have political leanings of any kind; he did not monitor or even read the proposed inscription handed to him on a piece of paper by his brother's widow, which was given to the tombstone inscriber.

[6]The court then heard that the CID started investigating the tombstone on 11 May 1983 and had seized the original piece of paper from the tombstone-maker's shop in Choa Chu Kang.

[7] The court threw out Chu Boon's defence plea and he was convicted on grounds that he had "under his control, the tombstone of his brother, Tan Chay Wa, on which was engraved in Chinese characters an inscription which tended to advocate acts prejudicial to the security of Singapore.

In 1985, it was reported that the inscription of the tombstone had been whited out with plaster by members of Tan's own family who wished to obscure any glorification of Chay Wa's "martyrdom" in the communist cause.

[5] In his 1986 book The Tiger and the Trojan Horse, British author Dennis Bloodworth noted that "the ideograms in stone, chiselled by a sentient hand, were proof that this was the epitaph of a man, not a movement.