Longtime S'pore prisoner freed

Longtime S'pore prisoner freed

SINGAPORE (AFP): A longtime Singapore political prisoner freed from restrictions on Friday 32 years after his arrest said the government decision was belated and called for an end to detention without trial.

"It's a belated move," former MP Chia Thye Poh, who was once known along with current South African President Nelson Mandela as one of the world's longest-held political prisoners, said by telephone as a restriction order on him lapsed on Friday.

"It's already 32 years and the best part of my life was taken away," said the 58-year-old Chia, a former university lecturer who was 26 when he was arrested in 1966 after joining a radical breakaway faction of the ruling People's Action Party.

Chia, who was never brought to trial, called for the scrapping of the Internal Security Act (ISA) under which he was arrested and which remains in force in Singapore and Malaysia, where it was initially used to hold sacked deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim in September.