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Singapore hangs ex-cop found guilty of 2013 Kovan double murder
Iskandar was sentenced on Dec 4, 2015, to hang, after he was convicted of the murders of Mr Tan Boon Sin, 67, and his elder son, Mr Tan Chee Heong, 42.PHOTO: ST FILE
Ang Qing
UPDATED FEB 05, 2025, 11:16 AM
SINGAPORE – A former police officer who was convicted of the 2013 murders of a father and his son in Kovan was hanged on Feb 5.
The Singapore Police Force said the capital sentence was imposed on Iskandar Rahmat, 46, whose petitions to the President for clemency were unsuccessful.
Iskandar was sentenced on Dec 4, 2015, to hang, after he was convicted of the murders of Mr Tan Boon Sin, 67, and his elder son, Mr Tan Chee Heong, 42, at the senior Tan’s Hillside Drive house on the afternoon of July 10, 2013.
He appealed against his conviction and sentence, but the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on Feb 3, 2017, which was also Iskandar’s 38th birthday.
The police said he was accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel both at the trial and at the appeal.
They added: “Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, including murder.”
Grisly details of the deaths and the 54-hour search for Iskandar, who had fled to Malaysia, shocked Singapore at the time.
The veteran police officer of 14 years was facing imminent bankruptcy in 2013 when he plotted to steal from the 67-year-old car workshop owner.
Iskandar, who was 34 at the time, knew from a police report Mr Tan Boon Sin had made that the older man kept a large sum of cash in a safe deposit box.
On July 10, 2013, Iskandar persuaded Mr Tan Boon Sin to remove his money from the box so that a camera could be placed inside.
He then escorted the victim back to his terrace house in Hillside Drive, where the senior staff sergeant stabbed and slashed him 27 times.
When the victim’s 42-year-old son entered the house, Iskandar also stabbed the younger Tan.
Iskandar then dragged Mr Tan Chee Heong under his getaway car for nearly 1km, leaving a trail of blood as onlookers watched in horror.
Two days after Iskandar fled Singapore, he was nabbed in Johor Bahru at a seafood restaurant just minutes away from the Causeway.
In 2015, he was found guilty of two counts of murder, following a trial.
While Iskandar did not dispute the killings, he had maintained throughout the trial that Mr Tan Boon Sin attacked him first with a knife, and that he had reacted in self-defence by stabbing and slashing his victim after wresting the knife away.
He also said that he had retaliated against Mr Tan’s son, who had charged at him with clenched fists.
The prosecution argued that Iskandar had intended to kill both victims, pointing to the multiple knife wounds suffered by both men – mostly in the vital areas of the head, neck and chest.
Delivering his verdict in a packed courtroom of about 60 people, then High Court Justice Tay Yong Kwang rejected Iskandar’s defence and found that he had attacked the two men “cruelly and relentlessly with the clear intention of causing death”.
Iskandar was represented by different counsel during his appeal in 2016 against his conviction and sentence, which was dismissed in 2017.
In 2018, he filed a complaint to the Law Society against his trial defence team.
A four-member inquiry committee, after speaking to Iskandar in prison and getting explanations from the lawyers, decided that no formal investigation was necessary.
In June 2019, Iskandar asked the High Court to order the Law Society to start the process for a disciplinary tribunal to be appointed to investigate his complaint.
The High Court found that formal investigations were not warranted and dismissed his application in October 2019.
Iskandar then filed an appeal against this decision.
The Law Society tried to strike out his appeal, but the apex court in January 2021 ruled that complainants who are pursuing disciplinary probes against lawyers have the right to appeal all the way to Singapore’s highest court.
In July 2021, Iskandar failed to convince the Court of Appeal that his defence team should be investigated for misconduct.
