The Editor,
The Hong Kong Standard,
635, King's Road,
Hong Kong,
A
ATTORNEY GENERAL'S CHAMBERS
HONG KONG
27th February, 1975.
Sir,
I am replying to Mrs. Elliott's further letter about the case
of Mr. CHAN Sing which was published in your newspaper on 14th February.
In answer (a) in my letter of 5th February (which dealt with
Mrs. Elliott's question as to how the police officer who interviewed
Mr. CHAN was able to give details of the killing when no one else
had been arrested), I wrote "Mr. CHAN himself said, when interviewed
in the presence of his legal advisers, that he made up the whole story
in his statement, basing it on what the inspector and other police
officers had told him of the circumstances". Though I did not put
them in quotation marks in my letter, the words "he made up the
whole story in his statement, basing it on what the inspector and
other police officers had told him of the circumstances" were the words
used by Mr. CHAN himself (subject to their being in the first person).
They were said when he was interviewed at the beginning of the
investigation into this matter in the presence of the legal aid
officer who was acting for him and a Crown Counsel. And they were
said when he was asked during the interview how he was able to give a detailed (though inaccurate) account of the circumstances of the
robbery and the killing that took place in the course of it. Thus,
this was not "the police explanation". Nor has there been a police
explanation of the matter. The outcome of the investigation, as I said
in my answer (c), was that Mr. CHAN claims that he made the statement
involuntarily because he was afraid. That claim has not led to
criminal proceedings against any of the police officers involved for the reason which I have already given this was (and I quote from my earlier letter) that "the only evidence against the police officers
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