HE WAS so infuriated with their behaviour that he wanted to 'strangle them'.

The three British tourists' 'offence': Poking fun at an elderly trishaw rider here struggling with their weight and then refusing to pay him after the ride.

To add insult to injury, one of them posted the video of the incident on YouTube, titling it, 'The Slowest Taxi in Southeast Asia'.

'I'd like to see the three of them and embarrass them so bad with a good dressing-down,' said Mr David Miller, 60, a Canadian who has been living in Singapore for the last 14 years.

'I think it's bull**** that they were trying to make fun of an adult they should respect,' the management consultant added.

Mr Miller even called for them to pay $50 each to the elderly man 'for the privilege they had of insulting him' and suggested that they 'be placed on a list of non-desired persons in Singapore'.

'When you go to someone's house, you respect them. When you do, you are treated like a king, especially in this region, and there is no better place on the planet,' said Mr Miller, who has lived in Hong Kong, Beijing, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and India.

'I am disgusted by people like that. The fact that they had the arrogance to post it on the Internet shows how low-class they are.'

But don't they deserve a second chance?

Mr Miller added: 'If their apology had been genuine, I would give them a second chance. But what killed me was that he gave a very easy apology. If the reporter had not called him, would he have done anything? He never even apologised directly to the old man.

'We don't need people like that, and we shouldn't let them off.'

Most aggravating, he said, was how they were laughing at the rider.

'If I had got his father or mother to do that, how would they have felt?' he asked.

FURORE

Other readers were also upset over how the three British tourists had treated the rider, Mr Lee Shee Lam, 67.

Said Mr Lucas Lee in an e-mail to The New Paper: 'Isn't it ironic how the country which he struggled to build has played host to a bunch of foreigners that took his livelihood as a joke and spat on it?'

There was also a huge uproar online. The video, which was re-posted on YouTube after the original poster, Mr Bo Davis, took it down, drew more than 600 angry responses, mostly from Singaporeans.

Some called for justice to be done, others hurled abuse at the tourists, and even threatened them with violence.

And many were not satisfied with Mr Davis' apology carried by The New Paper yesterday, in which he said: 'I am sorry for the offence caused, and for being disrespectful to the elderly. But I think it's been blown out of proportion.'

Reacting to criticism that they had bullied Mr Lee, he said: 'Looking back, I think we were insensitive. But bullies, no.'

Like Mr Miller, one YouTube user, yahling, dismissed Mr Davis' apology: 'Clearly, your denials are ignoramously inane and disgusting... You should be tried and charged in Singapore for being cheats.'

Several of the online postings also took on a racist tone as they railed against Caucasians.

While Mr Miller felt the three men gave foreigners like himself 'a bad name', he was quick to add that not all behaved that way.

'Some get arrogant when they visit (other countries). (But) they do not represent the majority of foreigners,' he said.