Nurin Murder Case: Dead end at every turn for investigators

By : V. Shuman

KUALA LUMPUR: It was by far one of the largest police investigations and even included the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.

But despite several arrests no one was charged with the abduction and murder of Nurin Jazlin Jazimin

The Year Two pupil of SK Desa Setapak was abducted some 500m from her house in Section 1, Wangsa Maju.

Her frantic family made numerous appeals to her abductors to free the girl as she suffered from hypertension and kidney ailments.

When Nurin did turn up 28 days after she went missing, it was in a sports bag left at the foot of a staircase in a shoplot in Petaling Jaya Selatan.

Police obtained the tape from a closed-circuit television camera from an adjacent shoplot, and released footage that showed a man arriving at the scene on a motorcycle, carrying a sports bag and leaving empty-handed.

The CCTV tape was sent to FBI headquarters to enhance the footage, but they could not obtain a clear image of the registration number of the suspect's motorcycle.

The closest thing to a lead from the tape was a blurry image of the suspect, which was released to the media.

Several days later, five people were picked up in several raids in Shah Alam and a watching nation thought justice would finally be served.

However, one of the five, a pregnant woman, was released soon after and the release of the four detained men would follow not much later.

Then, on Sept 29, an Indonesian woman was arrested when it was found that she had, in the preceding weeks, sent text messages to Nurin's father, claiming she had the girl. The woman, however, swallowed the subscriber identity module (SIM) card of the cell phone investigators thought contained evidence linking her with the murder.

Their hopes were dashed, however, when the SIM card, when it was finally flushed out, proved too damaged to have any data extracted.

The lack of evidence meant the foreign woman had to be released, albeit into the "care" of the Immigration Department as she had no valid travel documents.

On Oct 11, police released two more segments of the CCTV recordings showing three men in a Perodua Kenari and a woman wearing a red T-shirt and jeans.

The three men soon turned themselves in but were found to have not been involved in the case. The "woman" in the red T-shirt, meanwhile, turned out to be a 15-year-old girl, who was also released after questioning.

The search for the perpetrators continued as police promised they would not forget Nurin, but it was not until January this year that more arrests were made.

A security guard and a drug addict were picked up, but released four days later, even before their remand orders had expired.

Two months later, Federal CID director Datuk Bakri Zinin, while claiming that the file on Nurin was still open, added that police had failed to solve the case.

- The New Straits Times