Reliving a nightmare
Sukdave Singh, the security guard shot during the Japanese red army siege at the aIa building in Kuala Lumpur in 1975, laments that not enough was done to help him.
NOBODY has ever come back again to see if I am alive or dead,” Sukdave Singh complains. Forty years ago, the security guard was shot when he went to investigate what turned out to be the start of the Japanese Red Army siege at the AIA building in Kuala Lumpur.
Back then, his photograph was plastered over local and foreign newspapers and he was recognised for his heroism. But since his retirement, every Aug 4 passes like any other day, with no visitors.
That Monday morning in 1975 started wrong. Sukdave, then 29 and the assistant to the chief of security, was supposed to be one of three on his shift. But one person was off duty while the other was not well and had just gone to the hospital.
“I was alone at the ground floor,” he recalls, when AIA office manager Robert Leong told him there appeared to be a robbery on the ninth floor, where the AIA agency office, the Swedish Embassy and the consular section of the United States embassy were.
Actually, it was the beginning of a fourday crisis involving 53 hostages – including the United States Consul Robert Stebbins and the Swedish Charge d’Affaires Fredrik Bergenstrahle (who has since died) – but no one in the rest of the building knew that at the time.
Sukdave was also not well, but he called his boss, Mahinder Singh, and they both headed up. “He controlled the lift,” Sukdave says. “I stuck half my head out of the lift and looked at the AIA office on the left.”
The guard was unarmed but, he believes, his turban looked like a police turban. That is probably why the terrorists, who were in the US consular section at the right, fired at him. “A bullet went under my right eye and out at the back,” he says.
Till today, he believes he was lucky. “I was facing left,” Sukdave explains. “If I had been facing right, I could have had a worse injury or been killed.”
At the time, he thought Mahinder had struck him. Covered in blood, he fell back into