SINGAPORE, June 3 — The former personal assistant of the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA’s) director-general was sentenced to six weeks’ jail today for leaking confidential information in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The woman, Noorain Jubli, passed the information to her husband, Khairul Annuar Zakaria, 40, who leaked it to others. He was fined S$2,000 today.
The leaked details, some of which turned out to be inaccurate, subsequently went viral on the internet.
The couple did this days before the circuit breaker period, a semi-lockdown period imposed from April 7 to June 1, 2020 to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
During the course of her work, Noorain, 39, saw a draft media statement detailing the implementation of full home-based learning by schools and Institutes of Higher Learning, as well as the closure of preschools and student care centres.
She sent a photo of the statement, along with more photos of a draft list of essential services that would continue operating during the circuit breaker, to Khairul.
The information was officially released to the public several hours afterwards.
Today, the couple each pleaded guilty to one charge under the Singapore Food Agency Act, which prohibits the disclosure of such confidential information to unauthorised persons. Another similar charge was taken into consideration for sentencing.
They had originally been charged under the Official Secrets Act.
The court heard that Noorain signed an undertaking in 2000 to safeguard official information.
She was given security clearance with effect from October 2017 when she was appointed as the personal assistant to the SFA’s director-general. She was also given access to parts of his email inbox.
On April 3, 2020, an email with a draft media statement — a joint one by the Ministry of Social and Family Development and the Ministry of Education — was sent to the director-general.
The email also contained a draft Ministry of Health (MOH) press release containing circuit breaker measures, as well as draft public guidelines by the Ministry of Trade and Industry on the list of essential services allowed to operate during that period.
Noorain took photos of this, not including the press release from MOH, and sent them via WhatsApp to Khairul.
Khairul, who worked as a technical officer, had wanted to know if his job would be affected.
Khairul cropped the photo of the draft media statement, eliminating Noorain’s laptop screen and the background of her surroundings. He then sent it to a WhatsApp chat group titled “Geng Shaffri” which had 13 members.
The information circulated online and caught the authorities’ attention.
At 1pm that same day, Khairul saw an online article containing one of the images he had leaked, he deleted all the messages in the chat group in relation to the image. He also told the other members to delete the image.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong officially announced the details in a televised address to the nation a few hours later.
Noorain and Khairul could have been jailed for up to 12 months or fined up to S$2,000, or punished with both.
In April 2021, SFA said Noorain had been suspended from her duties a year earlier, as soon as SFA had learnt that police had commenced their investigations, CNA reported at the time. — TODAY
