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Lee Kuan Yew’s daughter Lee Wei Ling dies at 69 in Singapore

Brother and former PM Lee Hsien Loong posted a heartfelt message about his sister’s death, lamenting ‘shadow’ that had come between siblings

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Lee Wei Ling (second from right) pictured with her father, Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, in a photo her brother Lee Hsien Loong shared on Instagram. Photo: Instagram/LeeHsienLoong
Lee Wei Ling, the daughter of Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, died at home on Wednesday morning at the age of 69.
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She was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare and degenerative brain disease, in 2020.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong said of his younger sister: “She was fiercely loyal to friends, sympathised instinctively with the underdog, and would mobilise actively to do something when she saw unfairness, or suspected wrongdoing. She was a fighter.”
He also acknowledged the rift that had come between them in the years since their parents’ deaths. He recalled Lee Kuan Yew telling him when he was 13 to take care of his mother and younger siblings if anything were to happen to the senior Lee.

“Sadly, after he passed away in 2015, a shadow fell between my siblings and me, and I was unable to fulfil his wish. But I held nothing against Ling, and continued to do whatever I could to ensure her welfare,” the former prime minister and eldest of the Lee siblings said.

A collage of photographs featuring his late sister Lee Wei Ling that Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Hsien Loong shared on Instagram. Photo: Instagram/LeeHsienLoong
A collage of photographs featuring his late sister Lee Wei Ling that Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Hsien Loong shared on Instagram. Photo: Instagram/LeeHsienLoong

Lee Wei Ling and brother Lee Hsien Yang, 67, are estranged from minister Lee over what to do with their family home at 38 Oxley Road, where she lived, following their father’s death.

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