A WEEK after Muhammad Sazali and his friends were involved in a gang attack in Clarke Quay in 2003 where a youth died, he escaped into Malaysia by walking along two water pipes at Marsiling. Seven years later, he turned himself in. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 21/2 years in jail and six strokes of the cane for rioting while armed with a knife. Muhammad, now 29, was also jailed a year and three months for deserting the Singapore Civil Defence Force since April 2003.
Fourteen accomplices involved in the attack have been dealt with. They received sentences ranging from probation and reformative training to prison terms of six months to 11/2 years as well as caning.
The group called themselves the Ubi Boys, after the neighbourhood they hailed from, and on Wednesday, a district court heard a blow-by-blow account of how the group planned and carried out an attack. At about midnight on April 16, four of the group went down to Jams The Club at Clarke Quay, where they knew the rival group would be. They were soon joined by the rest of the Ubi group, most of them arriving in two vans.
A fight, involving knifes and screwdrivers, then erupted between the two groups. The target of the Ubi group was Mr Suhaimi Salleh, then 22. He was not injured but his friend Mohamad Sadik Senin, 19, suffered multiple slash and stab wounds and died at the Singapore General Hospital at about 3.50am.
The cause of death was determined as acute bleeding of the aorta and forensic evidence indicated that the injury was likely to have been inflicted by a screwdriver stabbed into his back and into the heart.
In May, Muhammad decided to surrender himself to the Malaysian police, and was jailed four months for entering the country illegally. He was released on Aug 20 last year and handed over to the police here.
-- ST