“In an interview, Mr. Bagares said the police reports should show whether proper procedures were followed. According to the operations manual used by the police, he said, the death of a suspect during an operation requires the filing of at least 30 documents, including a report to the state prosecutor seeking to establish that the suspect died while resisting officers.”

Though the founding father of a tiny country on the tip of the Malay peninsula, Lee Kuan Yew is one of the giants of the arriving Asian century. Fifty years from now monuments will commemorate the legendary feats of this British-trained barrister who only learned Chinese when he became prime minister in 1959. Not only did he miraculously transform the impoverished colonial entrepot of Singapore, rife with drugs and prostitution, into a gleaming model city state of the 21st century; his practical vision of soft-authoritarian capitalism also became the template for Deng Xiaoping’s “opening up and reform” in China, laying the basis for the stunning rise of a prosperous East Asia.