Hateful slurs against the Malay community were seen on Friday scrawled on poles just outside Aljunied train station which is near a primary and secondary school.

The incident was captured by novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal who posted photos of these scrawlings on her Facebook page, saying she was “sickened and shocked” by the hateful slurs.

“Scores of primary school students would have walked past these pillars this morning,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

“People on their way to work were reading, registering and quickly looking away.”

Since then, a 30-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the incident, reported The Straits Times.

It is not known what the man’s nationality or background was.

The slurs scrawled on the poles outside the train station contained words like “Malay mati”, which means “Malay die” in English.

Other slurs brought up graphic sexual acts and one seemed to refer to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, although it is not independently verifiable if it actually did refer to Anwar.

This is not the first such incident in recent times involving racial slurs: in October, a man went to Facebook to raise his distress over Anti-Hindu scrawlings written outside his house.

If the 30-year-old man is convicted under the Vandalism Act, he could be liable to a fine up to S$2,000, jailed for not more than three years and receive between three to eight strokes of the cane.

Singapore’ Sedition Act classifies sedition as a tendency “to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore”.

If convicted under the Sedition Act for a first offense, the man could be fined up to S$5,000 or receive a jail term not exceeding three years, or both.

In 2015, a Filipino nurse who was working in a Singapore hospital was convicted for sedition in the Singapore courts after he made derogatory remarks against Singaporeans by calling them “Stinkaporeans”.

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