SINGAPORE, April 1 — Ai Takagi is likely to be the first witness to testify for her husband Robin Yang Kaiheng when he launches his defence against seven sedition charges relating to articles published on the now-defunct sociopolitical site The Real Singapore (TRS), said his lawyer Choo Zheng Xi.

Yang, 27, who has denied being involved in the distribution and proprietorship of TRS, could start arguing his case today if the prosecution, which has produced eight witnesses so far, closes its case.

One of those who took the stand yesterday was Gowri Yanaseckaran, who had sent a video clip of an incident between plainclothes police officers and members of the public during the Thaipusam procession last year to TRS.

The site published the clip along with a February 4, 2015 article that falsely claimed that the incident had resulted from a Filipino family’s complaint about the playing of musical instruments during the Thaipusam procession.

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In her statement to the police, Gowri said she was at the procession with her fiance, who was carrying a kavadi that day, when plainclothes officers stepped in to stop his musicians from playing their instruments — as it was against the law.

Gowri, a nurse, said her email to TRS only expressed her unhappiness with how the police had behaved and her intent to raise awareness of the incident.

She described the manner in which the police officers had acted and had attached a two-minute-and-50-second video of the incident.

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Shortly after she sent the email, Gowri got a response from the TRS editorial team, which said the site would share her story “right away”.

When she read TRS’ Facebook post on the incident, Gowri was surprised that the article said it erupted from a complaint from a Filipino family, whose young child had cried because of the noise from the playing of the urumi, an Indian folk drum.

“I had made no mention of any complaint by a Pinoy family in my email to TRS,” she added.

On February 5, Gowri shared The Online Citizen’s article of the Thaipusam incident on her Facebook page, adding a comment that this was the actual story, while the posting on the TRS Facebook page was “cooked-up” and “all nonsense”.

“I was shocked to see that even though the article was attributed to my nickname ‘Ri Nitesha’, the contents of the article were not the same as the contents of my email to TRS.

"In particular, my email to TRS did not make any mention of a Pinoy family having caused the incident with the police,” Gowri said.

During its re-examination of investigation officer Roy Lim yesterday, the prosecution also sought to rebut Choo’s argument that his client was not the user who had discussions relating to TRS with third parties on Skype.

Referring to a conversation in which the user had referred to Takagi in the third person, the prosecution said it suggested Yang was on the keyboard at that time — the couple share a Skype account.

The prosecution also tackled Choo’s rebuttal of its argument that the use of Singlish and Hokkien vulgarities in these chats was the smoking gun that Yang, and not Takagi, was involved in the Skype conversations.

Prosecutors took to counting the number of times Singlish terms like “liao”, “lor” and other Hokkien vulgarities were used in some of the chats.

In contrast, Takagi was only known to use the Singlish term “lah”.

Besides Takagi, Yang and his mother are expected to testify over the next few days of the trial, which resumes today. — TODAY