SINGAPORE, Feb 21 — When bus driver Lee Kim Huat was driving down Tekka Lane on the night of Dec 8, he noticed Indian national Sakthivel Kumaravelu waving his hands at him, appearing to signal for the bus to stop.

However, Lee, 55, signalled to Sakthivel, 33, that the bus was full and would not stop.

“This would be the last time that I saw the said Indian worker,” Lee told investigators in a statement, which was read yesterday at the Committee of Inquiry (COI) into the Little India riot.

Lee said traffic on his right side was clear as he prepared to make a turn onto Race Course Road. He then took a quick glance at his left mirror, before proceeding to make the turn.

“I did not see the Indian worker at this point,” the driver said.

Lee “suddenly felt a bump” coming from the left side of the bus as he was completing the turn.

The driver and all the passengers got off the bus, where they found Sakthivel lying under the vehicle’s left rear wheel.

A mob then gathered and turned aggressive towards Lee and bus timekeeper Wong Geck Woon, who also testified yesterday in the inquiry.

Video footage showed that after Lee alighted from the bus, he crouched down twice to look below the vehicle.

Questioned by COI Chairman G Pannir Selvam on why he did not try to help Sakthivel, Lee said he was not supposed to do anything after any collision.

“At that point, I was very scared. It did not occur to me at the point of time,” the witness said.

Asked by Senior State Counsel David Khoo about Lee’s thoughts when he saw Sakthivel pinned under the bus, Lee said: “At first, I thought he was dead.”

When asked by Khoo to further elaborate what he meant by “at first”,  Lee said: “To my mind, since a big vehicle went over him, (he) must be dead, that’s what I thought.”

The inquiry yesterday also heard that Lee did not turn on a monitor — slightly bigger than the size of an Apple iPad mini — located on the left side of the driver’s dashboard, which would show him if any object is within the vicinity of the bus.

Responding to a question from Selvam, who asked why he did not turn on the monitor, Lee said the glare from the monitor could affect him. Even if the monitor was turned on, the driver said he would not have been able to see Sakthivel due to poor lighting.

Lee said he had not encountered any unruly or rowdy incidents during his five years of ferrying foreign workers from dormitories to Little India before the riot.

The driver, who is given 40 per cent of the takings for plying the trips, added: “Occasionally, about once a month, one of these workers will vomit in the bus on the return trip ... Even if the workers are drunk, they usually have friends to take care of them and they are generally well behaved.”

Separately, a third Indian national was jailed for refusing to disperse during the Little India riot last December despite orders to do so by the police.

Selvaraj Karikalan, 28, was yesterday sentenced to 18 weeks’ imprisonment on a lesser charge of failing to disperse.

He had initially faced a charge of rioting, which carries the maximum penalty of seven years in jail and caning. Additional reporting by Channel NewsAsia. — Today