Orchard Cineleisure slashing attack : Nine suspects arrested, two charged

UPDATE 18/6, 8.50PM: Two men have been charged in court with rioting. According to local media, they are Mizra Abdul Azman, 23, and Muhammad Fahmi Razali, 20. The pair have been remanded at Central Police Division for further investigation.

UPDATE 18/6, 946AM: Police have arrested nine suspects for the attack. They are aged between 20 and 22 years old, reported The Straits Times. Early investigations reveal at least two had been armed with weapons.

UPDATE 17/6: 838AM (adding quotes from victim, details of attack): The NSF injured in Saturday night's attack has been identified as Wilson Siau. He is now reportedly in stable condition. He told Chinese daily Shin Min Daily News that the gang who attacked him had approached him as he was smoking and commented on his "arrogant" walking style. As he turned to walk away, the gang -- at least 10 of them -- attacked him with parangs for about a minute before fleeing in separate taxis. 

A violent attack on a full-time National Serviceman (NSF) just outside Orchard Cineleisure on Saturday night left him bleeding profusely and immediate eyewitnesses in shock.

The attack, in full view of passers-by shortly after 9pm, took place in the small open plaza between Starbucks and the entrance of Orchard Cineleisure. The space is a popular gathering area and youth hang-out.

26-year-old Toh Z H, a bank analyst, witnessed the whole incident from about 5 metres away.

He told Yahoo! Singapore, "We were walking through the entrance when there was a loud noise. (We) turned back and we saw a guy running away. Then we saw three people, two of which were whacking a big-sized guy. And they were holding a long silverish thing, either a long parang or a metal bar, like more than 30cm (in length)."

"Then the big-sized guy was just clutching his head. His attackers ran off; blood started dripping and all. The security guard came out," said Toh before adding that the attackers were smaller-sized and were heard shouting in Malay.

Toh, who was left traumatized by the whole incident, said a lot of people started to surround the injured man.

"We were just stunned, and the ambulance took quite some time to come," he added.

Police confirmed they received a call at about 9:12pm requesting for assistance. Upon arrival, a man was found injured and was conveyed semi-conscious to Singapore General Hospital (SGH). Meanwhile, the Singapore Civil Defence Force added that they were contacted two minutes later, and found that the man, who was Chinese and in his 20s, had sustained lacerations.

22-year-old Douglas Sim, a trained nurse, happened to be sitting at Old Town White Coffee inside the mall with his friends when the group noticed a commotion outside the nearby 7-Eleven convenience store.

With his ex-colleague Valentina Soliano, he ran forward to the scene where they saw the victim "propped up against a pillar outside the main entrance, semi-conscious". He was responding to questions, added Sim, but there was a lag in verbal response and he couldn't keep his eyes open.

"He was bleeding profusely, there were a lot of slashes. From the wounds he sustained we could see that the weapon could be quite big and sharp, because the slashes were deep," he told Yahoo! Singapore, adding that his immediate priority was to stem the heavy bleeding. They were shortly after joined by a third friend and nurse, Jervena Liu.

The trio checked the young man's identification, as per procedure, and found out he is a full-time national serviceman, describing him as "obese" and between 165-168cm in height. He was also wearing black jeans and a T-shirt.

"We had to make sure he could move his arms, and try to keep him awake at the same time," said Sim. "There were five of us helping (him). Both his arms were slashed, and there were head injuries. I was tending to one arm, two others to the other and someone else was tending to his head."

Passers-by had previously used tissue rolls and cloths from a cleaning cart to wrap the young man's wounds, and the nurses did their best to re-clean them and apply pressure to stop the bleeding with gauze from a first aid kit, he added.

"There were pools of blood everywhere. He was still bleeding profusely when we administered first aid," he said.

"If the paramedics came any later he might have passed out," added Sim. From his friends' judgement, the man had lost between 500-800 mls of blood by the time the ambulance arrived at about 9:30pm.

28-year-old tutor Joanne Lee was so disturbed by what she saw that she did not feel like she could sit through the movie she was there to watch.

"There was a lot of blood, just a lot of blood everywhere and people were freaking out and shouting. Someone said there were two gangs quarrelling and there was a slash and run," she told Yahoo! Singapore. "It was really traumatizing, people kept asking, 'When is the ambulance coming?'"

Eyewitnesses also spoke of a separate incident earlier in the evening at the nearby *SCAPE, where a man wielding a knife was believed to be set upon by a group of other people.

He eventually walked off bleeding, but warned a shopkeeper who witnessed the incident not to call the police. It's not immediately clear if both incidents are related.