What the hell! First they deny it now they admit it!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

There is inconsistencies and it is getting more and more suspicious! Was he killed because he refused to cooperate?

Parents insist engineer was murdered

Months before Shane Todd was found hanging in his Singapore apartment, the US engineer told his parents his life was being threatened.

''We believe our son was murdered. We know our son was murdered,'' said Mary Todd, a US pastor who has arrived in Singapore for a coronial inquiry that centres on claims involving Huawei, the Chinese communications company likely to emerge with all or part of a $2 billion-plus contract to build an ultra-fast mobile network for Optus in Australia.

According to Singapore's official version of events, Shane Todd, 31, committed suicide in June, one week before he was due to return to the US after 18 months working for a Singapore government research centre, the Institute of Microelectronics (IME).

But the death has struck a nerve amid global tensions over alleged spying operations originating from China after the chance finding of what Mrs Todd thought was a speaker among her son's belongings days after his death.
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It turned out to be a hard drive that contained thousands of documents Todd had backed up from his work computer. Experts engaged by Mrs Todd and her husband, Rick, say the hard drive contained a draft of a project outline between IME and Huawei on the development of an amplifier device that used a compound used in semiconductors called gallium nitride.

The heat-resistant material has uses in products such as LED screens but has military applications in radar and satellite systems.

Shane Todd had been trained in the US on proprietary equipment that produces the material but is restricted for export because of the potential military applications.

Rick Todd said his son told him: ''I think they've asked me to compromise US security. I feel like I would be betraying my country.''

IME and Huawei have denied they were collaborating on research on the material.

Singapore's Foreign Affairs and Law Minister, K. Shanmugam, said in March that Todd worked on a small project with Huawei for nine months but research on gallium nitride never went ahead.

The circumstances of Todd's death are being contested at the 12-day inquest opened on Monday.

An original autopsy concluded that Todd died by hanging before his Filipino girlfriend found his body suspended from a door in his apartment two days after he quit his job at IME. Two US medical examiners agreed with the findings in evidence on Monday.

Police also testified that an examination of Todd's laptop found he had visited suicide-related websites on 19 occasions last year, most of which were on June 23, the day before he was found dead.

But an investigation by reporters commissioned by the Financial Times brought the case to the attention of the FBI, US senators and Secretary of State John Kerry, who raised it with Mr Shanmugam.

Mrs Todd says a suicide note was fake because it contained incorrect facts and didn't look like her son's writing.

With agencies

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/paren...#ixzz2TJ8BUket


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