'Hammer' teens rob 3 cabbies in 3 hours
Boys brandish hammer after flagging down cabs; police nab trio but one victim is warded with stitches on face
By Teh Joo Lin 
Mr See (right) suffered a 3cm gash on his left brow besides losing $160. Another victim, Mr Fong (left), was unhurt but had to surrender $300 and his mobile phone. -- ST PHOTOS: LIM CHIN PING
WEAPON OF CHOICE: This hammer (above), about 27cm long, was used by the teen robbers to threaten their victims.
ARMED with a hammer, three boys robbed three taxi drivers in a span of three hours yesterday morning.
It was a short-lived spree, but they attacked one victim so badly that he was warded with stitches on his face.
The teens pulled off all three holdups with the same modus operandi: Flag down a cab, give the cabby confusing directions and then produce the hammer.
Clementi Police Division officers and two of the victims gave an account of the robberies at a press conference yesterday.
At 2.30am, cabby See Boon Cheong, 60, picked up two 16 year olds at Jurong East Street 21.
While he had been asked to go to Toh Tuck, the teens re-directed Mr See around the estate before they stopped at Cheng Soon Garden.
He cracked a joke then: 'You all twist and turn, now I don't know where I am.'
That was when a teen clamped his hands over his eyes. His friend whacked his head with a hammer 'seven or eight times' while shouting 'Money! Money! Money!'.
Mr See surrendered his wallet, which had $160.
Once the teens fled, Mr See called the police. His left brow had a deep 3cm gash. 'My injuries could have been worse if the teen hadn't hit his friend's hand with the hammer.'
At 4.25am, the duo, students at a private school, struck again. This time, they had another friend, a 15-year-old school dropout, with them.
They got into a taxi at a bus stop along Bukit Batok East Avenue 3 and told the driver to drive to Clementi Central, before re-directing the 50-year-old to a carpark at Clementi Avenue 3.
The cabby struggled after one of the teens shouted 'pa chioh' or 'robbery' in Hokkien. It is unclear what happened but the teens fled empty-handed.
However, the driver, with bruises and cuts on his face and lips, was warded at the National University Hospital. His name was not released.
Cabby No. 3 Fong Peng Weng had seen a message flash on his screen urging drivers to be on the lookout. But he still fell prey.
At Block 207 Jurong East Street 21, one boy throttled his neck while another brandished the hammer.
'They said they wanted my money and not my life. This calmed me down a bit, so I handed over $300 and my mobile phone,' the 52-year-old said.
By now, police officers were patrolling the Jurong East area for the boys.
Sergeant Adhana Ahmad and Corporal Nazirul Haffiz were just a street away in their car when they spotted the trio at the void deck of Block 205.
'We alighted and chased them for about 500m at the void decks,' said Sgt Adhana. The robbers shook them off, but only for a while.
'We radioed for help and decided to go to Jurong East bus interchange to comb the area,' she said.
There, the officers cornered two of the suspects and retrieved part of the loot - only what they had pocketed from Mr Fong.
The third boy was arrested a few hours later when he alighted from a taxi at Block 107 Jurong East Street 13. He had the hammer on him.
Clementi Police Division commander Ng Yeow Boon commended his officers.
He said there were 'quite a number of cases of similar nature islandwide so far this year and last year'. Police are investigating if the teens are linked to them.
Two of the teens live in western Singapore, while the third lives in the central part of the island.
Source:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Free/Sto...ry_229432.html 
'Hammer' teens rob 3 cabbies in 3 hours 
