Australian Andrew Gosling has pleaded guilty to throwing a bottle from a balcony that killed a man

An Australian has pleaded guilty to throwing a bottle of wine from his Singapore home at a group of Muslims who attacked and killed a local man at a dinner party.

Andrew Gosling is charged in a Singapore court with a rash act that caused the death of 73-year-old delivery driver Nasiari Sunee in August 2019.

He also pleaded guilty to another charge of injuring Nasiari’s wife.

Prosecutors said the acts showed religious hostility, but the defense said Gosling’s judgment was impaired by alcohol. Gosling, who has been in Singapore for a month, faces seven years in prison and possible caning.

They said Gosling committed the offenses after witnessing a dinner with ethnic Malay Muslims from his balcony. He told police that he originally considered using a weapon, such as a pistol, to shoot at the group but decided against it because he felt it was a “heinous act”.

When he went to the garbage chute on the seventh floor where he lived, he found an empty wine bottle and threw it at the group two floors down, hitting Nasiari in the head as he was about to eat at a relative’s housewarming party.

The bottle bounced off Nasiari’s head, hitting his wife and injuring her shoulder. Nasiari suffered severe head injuries and died the next morning.

Andrew Gosling (centre), 47, reportedly threw a bottle of Italian red wine from the seventh floor of a Singapore apartment complex at around 8.40pm on August 18, hitting and killing a man standing two floors below

The bottle hit Nasiari Sunee (right), 73, who was two floors down at a housewarming party. He was taken to the hospital but died from his injuries.

Gosling fled after his act but surrendered to police 10 days later. He told police he threw the bottle to “scare” the group because he was angry about Islamist militant attacks on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002 and Melbourne in 2018 that had killed Australians.

“This was not an arbitrary rash act … he had hostile thoughts towards Muslims and acted on his hostility by pointing the bottle at the area near Nasiari’s table,” Assistant Prosecutor G. Kannan said.

If convicted, Gosling faces 7 years in prison and possible caning, similar to those carried out in Sharia nations like Indonesia (pictured).

The 47-year-old Australian IT worker is said to have thrown the wine bottle from the seventh floor of a 35-storey building – and fatally hit grandfather Nasiari Sunee, 73, in the head

“He fled the scene to avoid detection, shouting crude, religiously charged vulgarities about Muslims. …. The hasty act cannot be viewed in isolation. It has to be seen in tandem with the religious intensification,” Kannan said, calling the action “outrageous, senseless and appalling.”

Prosecutors asked the court to sentence Gosling to seven years in prison because the incident “has a wider impact, causing unease in Singapore, particularly among the broader Muslim population, and threatening to create public unrest.” About 15 percent of Singapore’s nearly 6 million residents are Muslims.

Defense attorney N. Sreenivasan cited a report by medical experts stating that alcohol may have impaired Gosling’s judgment. Gosling had drunk several beers earlier in the day.

The anti-Muslim thoughts “were obsessive negative thoughts that he was prone to having when intoxicated and did not represent the defendant’s true feelings or intentions,” Sreenivasan quoted the report as saying.

“This meant that even if he had committed the offence, it was unlikely that it was religiously motivated.”

However, the report said the amount of alcohol Gosling consumed was within his usual limits and caused no confusion.

The court said the sentencing will take place on April 8.