Stabbing incident in NTU — is it really an “attack”?

STREAMS OF protests have arisen on the Internet over the perceived biased coverage by the mainstream media on David Widjaja’s death, and not without good reason.

For the past week, the mainstream media has portrayed – intentionally or not — David as a reclusive loner hell-bent on murder. The motivation? His grades had slipped, and his scholarship was revoked. He became a deranged math genius who lost all sense of rationality. That seemed like a pretty neat explanation.

However, things may not be what they seem.

It has been assumed in many news reports carried by the mainstream media that David was the aggressor. The story goes that the professor was stabbed when his back was facing David. After the alleged assault, David then slashed his wrists, walked out the office, and climbed onto a linkway between two buildings before falling to his death.

But where did the source of this story come from? Apparantly, it originated from Associate Professor Chan Kap Luk’s colleagues.The Straits Times’ report by journalist Sujin Thomas on 3 March 2009, which happened to be one of the earliest reports on the incident, recounted the stabbing incident in vivid detail...

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