SINGAPORE, March 22 — When he was first presented with a charge of murder, Leslie Khoo Kwee Hock told the police that if he intended to kill his alleged lover, he would have come up with “a better plan”.

“If I had planned carefully, I would not have made mistakes,” he said to the police.

This emerged during his murder trial in court yesterday, as the prosecution continued cross-examining him.

Their case is that Khoo was “cool and calculated enough” to have planned what to do with Cui Yajie’s body after killing her, despite Khoo claiming that he was in a confused and dazed state after murdering the 31-year-old Chinese engineer on the morning of July 12, 2016.

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Khoo does not deny strangling Cui to death at a secluded spot in Gardens by the Bay East, before burning her body under a metal lorry canopy along Lim Chu Kang Lane 8. His defence is that he has intermittent explosive disorder — an impulse-control condition that might have caused him to lose control of his actions on the day he killed Cui.

Khoo fed charcoal and kerosene to the body to burn it over three days.

Placed body in drain

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Yesterday, he told the court that he later moved the body to a drain and added more charcoal to “make sure it burns completely… so I can send her off”.

However, Deputy Attorney-General Hri Kumar Nair said that he put the body in the drain to hide it from potential passers-by.

In his police statement, Khoo had said that he stood by the side of the canopy where the body was burning “to see if any people would come”.

Nair said: “You were thinking, you were not confused… You were being methodical, cool and cold-blooded.”

Khoo also told the police that he discarded the empty charcoal packages and kerosene tins in a bin after leaving Cui’s body in the drain.

He then drove out of the Lim Chu Kang area to Orchid Country Club, where he discarded Cui’s bag, wallet and keys in a bin there. He got rid of some of his own personal belongings at another bin in the country club.

Before discarding her bag, he pocketed S$30 (RM90) from her wallet and cut up her credit cards.

Nair asked him why he did not just throw everything away in the first bin, noting that Khoo was “very careful” to separate his belongings from hers and to cut up the cards so that no one would use them such that the suspicious transactions may alert the police.

And in going through the contents of the bag, he knew there was money and took it, Nair added.

Khoo then said in Mandarin through an interpreter: “She didn’t have much money — it was only S$30. What can I do with that? It’s not that I’m robbing her.”

“You can’t rob a dead person, right?” Nair asked.

“Would I throw away money?” Khoo countered.

Handling questions from wife, supervisor

Nair also tried to show that in handling the calls and phone text messages from his wife, his supervisor and Cui’s colleagues, Khoo was hardly lost and confused.

Khoo’s supervisor Adeline Toh, for example, called him shortly after he killed Cui to ask where they were, because he and Cui had arranged to meet her before they went to Gardens by the Bay.

He told Toh that the meeting was not happening because Cui did not show up.

Khoo’s wife contacted him a few hours after Cui died and he told her he was “busy”. Later that evening, he sent his wife two photos over WhatsApp of a washing machine and a “laughing till crying” emoji.

Khoo worked as a retail outlet manager at laundry firm Dryclyn Express.

Nair said: “The message you were sending your wife is to tell her you were busy at work, right? So you see, while you claim to be lost and confused and not knowing what to do, you were actually handling yourself very well — responding to Ms Toh, responding to your wife, working out what to do with the body and her belongings, what to do with your own belongings.”

Two days after Cui’s death, her colleagues called Khoo saying she was missing.

Khoo testified in court that they “chased” him to head down to Cui’s home and get her unit number, so that they could use the address to report her disappearance.

Nair said: “As far as her colleagues were concerned, you were the deceased’s boyfriend… so you needed to do something, if not you would look suspicious.”

Khoo insisted that he told them he was busy and did not want to go to Cui’s place.

‘The arrogance of a conman’

As he wrapped up his cross-examination, Nair read out Khoo’s statement to the police when he was presented with the murder charge.

Khoo told the court again that his mind was “hazy” and “in a mess” at the time.

“Your mind wasn’t hazy. This was the arrogance of a conman,” Nair said. “When you were faced with the charge of murder, what you said was, if you planned it properly, you wouldn’t have been caught.”

The prosecutor also read out a police statement, where Khoo told officers “something happened” and he could take them to Lim Chu Kang. He then smiled and said: “Nothing left.”

“You were so cold-blooded that you actually smiled when you told police there was nothing left,” Nair said.

Khoo replied: “I didn’t smile. (The officer) knew I wasn’t smiling. That was the day I prepared to bring him there… I already confessed to him.”

The trial continues today. — TODAY