Pulau Senang prison riots

The Pulau Senang riots was a case of armed rioting and murder that happened at the Singaporean island of Pulau Senang, where a reformative prison settlement was operated by the government of Singapore to imprison and rehabilitate secret society members, as well as to avoid prison overcrowding at Changi Prison. The settlement first opened in 1960, and had seen bouts of success in reforming many gang members and allowing them to rejoin society.

On 12 July 1963, about 70 to 90 out of the island prison's 300 detainees staged an uprising, resulting in a riot that devastated the whole settlement and killed four prison officers - consisting of Prisons Superintendent Daniel Stanley Dutton, and three of Dutton's assistants Chok Kok Hong (植国雄 Zhí Guóxióng), Tan Kok Hian (陈国贤 Chén Guóxián) and Arumugam Veerasingham. Several others, including prison officers and some of the detainees who refused to join the riot, were also injured. At the end of the riots, police reinforcements and the Police Coast Guard arrived at Pulau Senang to arrest the rioters, with 71 of them being charged with murder.

In an unprecedented 64-day trial ever conducted in the history of both Malaysia and Singapore, 59 rioters were brought to trial for four charges of murder, with both a special jury of seven and the veteran judge Murray Buttrose set to hear the case. Eventually, eighteen of the defendants, including the ringleader Tan Kheng Ann (alias Robert Black; 陈庆安 Chén Qìngān) were sentenced to hang for the murders while another 29 rioters were jailed between two and three years for both rioting and aggravated rioting with deadly weapons, and the remaining twelve defendants were acquitted of all charges. Provided by Wikipedia