Pritam's lawyer continues to raise doubts over Raeesah Khan's ...

WHETHER former Sengkang GRC MP Raeesah Khan’s evidence can be relied upon continued to be the subject of cross-examination on Wednesday (Oct 16), the third day of Workers’ Party (WP) chief Pritam Singh’s trial.

Singh’s lawyer, Andre Jumabhoy, sought to take the court through inconsistencies in Khan’s statements to the police and the Committee of Privileges, and the evidence she had given since the trial began on Monday.

This was as the defence had, on Tuesday, applied to impeach Khan’s credibility as a witness. If successful, what Khan says in court would be given less weight by the judge.

Singh is contesting two charges over his alleged lies to a parliamentary committee convened in November 2021 to investigate Khan’s untruth in Parliament.

Khan had, on Aug 3, 2021, told Parliament about how she had accompanied a sexual assault victim to a police station, where the victim was treated insensitively. She repeated the claim before the House on Oct 4 the same year, before admitting to her lie on Nov 1, 2021.

In the morning, Jumabhoy showed that Khan’s statement to the police on May 12, 2022, was that Singh told her on Oct 3, 2021, that “knowing them (the Government), they may bring it up again”, and if her untrue anecdote was brought up in Parliament on Oct 4, he would not judge her if she kept to her lie.

However, Khan had said on the first day of the trial that Singh had told her on Oct 3 that he did not think the issue will come up again, but that if it came up he would not judge her for continuing with her narrative.

Asked if there was a difference between her two accounts, Khan at first said it was different ways of saying the same thing, but later agreed that there was a difference.

Jumabhoy then pointed to an Oct 1, 2021, e-mail that Singh had sent to all current WP MPs reminding them of the serious consequences they would face if they could not back up what they said in Parliament.

The lawyer noted that Singh had mentioned this e-mail to Khan when they met on Oct 3.

Her testimony that he then told her he would not judge her if she continued her narrative could not be true.

“Would you agree that that’s simply absurd? It’s so absurd that, in fact, it didn’t happen (and) he never told you to continue the narrative,” said Jumabhoy.

Khan disagreed. Asked why she did not question Singh on what appeared to be two contradicting messages, she said the WP chief had told her he would not judge her if she kept up her narrative, and she had left it at that.

The defence made a separate impeachment application based on Khan’s Oct 4 text to Singh. When Minister for Law and Home Affairs K. Shanmugam raised the matter of her untrue anecdote in court, she had texted the WP chief asking what she should do.

Jumabhoy argued that the message was “materially contradictory” to her evidence in court.

This is as Khan told the court she lied again in Parliament on Oct 4 as she had Singh’s support to do so, while in her written statement, she said it was because Singh did not reply to her message and she was waiting for guidance.

“There can’t be a more bare-faced contradiction to what she’s saying there,” the lawyer told the court.

But Deputy Attorney-General Ang Cheng Hock said the message aligned with the gist of her evidence, which was to continue her narrative.

When confronted by Minister Shanmugam in Parliament, Khan had sought Singh’s assurance that he held to the same position from their meeting the day before.

It was “completely inappropriate” for the defence to rely on just a particular sentence to look at whether Khan’s credibility should be impeached, said the prosecutor.

Citing case law, he noted that the bar for impeachment is high. “Impeachment is a process which is not lightly gone into the court must be satisfied that there is a serious or material discrepancy,” he said.

Deputy Principal District Judge Luke Tan ruled that he did not see a contradiction in Khan’s statements, let alone a material contradiction. He agreed with Ang that Khan’s court testimony cannot be read in isolation. THE STRAITS TIMES