User:NelsonLee20042020/The Trials of Ram Puneet Tiwary

Ram Puneet Tiwary (1979 - ) was a Singaporean accused of the violent murder of his two friends and flatmates Tay Chow Lyang (1977-2003) and Tony Tan Poh Chuan (1976-2003), in which the case was dubbed the "Sydney Double Murders" in media. This sensational case made headlines in Singapore and Australia. Initially convicted twice on two occasions for the deaths of Tan and Tay, Ram Tiwary was acquitted upon his second appeal and freed 8 years after the occurence of the murders. Till today, the murder remains unsolved.

Murder
On the fateful day of 15 September 2003, two Singaporeans – 26-year-old Tay Chow Lyang and 27-year-old Tony Tan Poh Chuan – were found murdered in their flat in Sydney, Australia; Tay was bludgeoned to death while Tan, who returned home from a university lecture, was murdered some time after Tay's death. The victims' 24-year-old flatmate and fellow Singaporean, Ram Puneet Tiwary, who happened to be asleep in his room at the time of the murders, was awakened by sounds of violence, locked himself in the room and later, he called the ambulance and police upon seeing his flatmates' bodies. Tiwary, together with both Tay and Tan, attend the same class at the University of New South Wales at that time for an engineering course on an army scholarship provided by the Singapore Armed Forces.

Trials, Appeals and Acquittal
Initially a police witness, Tiwary was somehow, placed under arrest and charged with murder in May 2004. At the trial, a 12-member jury found Tiwary guilty of the double murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment without parole in 2006. It was said that the possible motive behind the murder was that Tiwary had owed a large sum of money to the victims and killed them for this. According to Tiwary in his memoir, he slated the possibility that racism could have been behind his guilty verdict. He added that he had been a target of several other inmates in prison for assault. The attacks has resulted in a partial loss of sensation in his right thumb and a scarred left shoulder.

Tiwary, who insisted his innocence, filed an appeal, and in 2008, the Court of Appeal in Australia ordered a re-trial for Tiwary, based on the review of evidence, in which some of them did not amount to a murder conviction. A year later, at the re-trial, the jury returned again with a guilty verdict, sentencing Tiwary to 48 years' imprisonment. Once again, Tiwary appealed against his conviction and sentence. After hearing the second appeal (which focused on Tiwary's tone in his phone call to the ambulance, the victims' unusual behaviour on the day of the murder as witnessed by several people and the forensic evidence), the Court of Appeal decided that the evidence against Tiwary was not satisfactory, therefore they found him not guilty of the murders of both Tay Chow Lyang and Tony Tan, and acquitted Tiwary of the double murder charges on 26 July 2012.

Aftermath
After returning to Singapore on 19 September 2012, Ram Tiwary penned down a 344-page-long memoir, titled 99 Months: The Case Of The Sydney Double Murders, which covers the case, as well as Tiwary's two trials, his experiences in prison, appeals and his eventual acquittal. It was published in September 2014. At the time of publication, Tiwary was 35 years old. It is also mentioned in an article that Tiwary had made a trip around the world after his return to Singapore. Till today, the murderer(s) of Tay Chow Lyang and Tony Tan Poh Chuan were never found.