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A man who accused the police of mistreating an elderly woman has publicly apologized after the force said he got the situation all wrong. 

Nicholas Zayden Tan today appealed for people to stop attacking him after the police said that he mischaracterized their encounter with an unidentified 85-year-old woman on social media. The police force said officers were trying to help the woman, believed to suffer from dementia, get home and were not bullying her for not wearing a mask as Tan earlier alleged.

“These allegations are not true. To clarify, the Police had responded to the incident as a 85-year-old woman, who did not have a mask on, appeared to be lost at the said location,”  a police statement said today. 

Not leaving the matter there, it added that they were looking into the posts Tan circulated.

“The Police take a serious view of such malicious allegations. The authorities are looking into the circulation of the falsehood,” it said.

Tan responded in the comments an hour later defending his assumption by saying the woman appeared “stressed out” and, in his opinion, the situation poorly handled. Nonetheless, he apologized to the officers involved and begged the public to stop harassing him online.

“I would like [to] apologise to the officers who were at the scene and hope people can stop sending me threats and hate messages on my DM,” he wrote. 

His now-removed posts included images of two police officers standing before the seated woman and also pointing at her. Though it’s unclear what they are discussing, no aggression is apparent in the images which Tan framed as overzealous enforcement of the mask mandate. He said the officers scolded her until a bystander intervened. 

“Do we really need 4 policemen to cluster an elderly auntie that took off her mask because she was feeling breathless?!?” he wrote. “Poor auntie already put back on her mask but they continued to tell her off to the extent someone had to come and salvage the situation.”

The police said the woman lived nearby, and they managed to contact her maid to bring her home. They also bought food for her and said two bystanders offered her a mask.

The police warned the public not to spread “unverified information or make their own conjectures on an incident.”

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