Stomp staff sacked over false 'MRT open door photo'

A photograph of an MRT train moving with one set of its doors open, has been found to be false.

A content producer of Singapore's citizen journalism website Stomp had initially claimed that she took the photograph last week.

23-year-old Samantha Francis claimed that she took the photograph herself at Lakeside MRT station last Tuesday night.

Following investigations by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), Ms Francis eventually admitted that she had taken the image from a post on social networking site Twitter.

The original tweet has since been removed.

On discovering this, Mr Patrick Daniel, editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division, sent a letter to Mr Tan Ek Kia, the interim chief executive of rail operator SMRT, apologising for the incident.

Ms Francis was also sacked by SPH, which owns Stomp, on the same day.

Mr Daniel said in his letter to SMRT: 'My team and I would like to apologise unreservedly to SMRT for this erroneous report by one of our staff. We truly regret the damage this has caused SMRT.'

He added: 'Aside from breaching our professional ethics, what she (Ms Francis) has done goes against all the values that we stand for.'