2007 09: Do your bit – help find Nurin

The Star online. News. Opinion. Thursday September 20, 2007

COMMENTBy LOONG MENG YEE

TWO little girls have gripped the nation’s attention. One is lying nameless, battered and dead in the mortuary.

The other, the nation has not seen in life. But pictures of her cute face, her sweet smile and clear round eyes are piercing, searing an image of innocence in our minds.

Also, there is the worry about her health. Nurin Jazlin Jazimin has high blood pressure and needs medication, otherwise she can get a stroke.

There has been no inkling of where eight-year-old Nurin is despite a massive nationwide search since she went missing on Aug 20.

The SRK Desa Setapak pupil never returned home after going to the night market near her house in Wangsa Maju.

What happened to her? And to the little one who died such a horrible death? What about the 16 other kids under the age of nine who seemed to have “vanished” between January and July this year?

Stories about missing children, especially those abducted, have always tugged at the heartstrings of Malaysians.

We grieve along with the parents. We agonise over the safety of the missing children; we cringe at the thought that they may be hurt in terrible ways, or of them being smuggled out and forced to beg in neighbouring countries.

How we demand that these animals be caught, and sent to jail forever. In fact, under the law, killers must hang. The nation is seething with anger over the way the nameless girl was so brutally killed.

Sadly, she is not the first.

Remember Ang May Hong, Nurul Huda Abdul Ghani or Harirawati Saridi? They were also sexually assaulted and murdered.

May Hong, nine, was raped and strangled just 70m from her home in Jalan Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur in 1987.

Harirawati, 10, was raped and murdered in Kota Kinabalu on Jan 19, 2004.

Nine days later, Nurul Huda, also 10, was raped by a security guard in the toilet of the guardpost of Kampung Pekajang in Johor, just 400m away from her house.

Each time there is such an incident, we get angry and demand action.

Let the same anger fire our determination to find Nurin. She does not deserve any other fate except to be safe in her parents’ arms again.

Every time a child goes missing, the media automatically goes into top gear, churning out as much information as possible.

When this happens, many groups come forward to aid the police by organising searches, distributing leaflets and offering monetary reward for information.

True, the number of missing children who remained lost far outnumber the ones found.
However, all of us doggedly hang on to cases with happy endings to keep us going through the anxious wait.

We constantly tell ourselves Nurin will be found.

After all, Mohd Nazrin Shamsul Ghazali, Ahmad Firdaus Hakim Sharizal and Nur Karmila Mohd Shah Nawas Nantha were reunited with their families.

Their names may not register but the way they went missing and the search for them gripped the nation.

Mohd Nazrin, or Yin, was the five-year-old boy from Ipoh who wandered off from his parents while shopping at Sogo on March 31.

He was found two weeks later. A Myanmar family had sheltered him. The foreign couple later surrendered Yin because they claimed they finally saw his “gone missing” poster. Friends, strangers, taxi drivers, corporate bodies had all chipped in to find Yin.

Ahmad Firdaus was the famous missing case in 2004. Then a six-month-old infant, he was abducted from his babysitter’s house in Kampung Baru in Kuala Lumpur by an Indonesian woman in August.

Taxi driver Jaaman Tamby Chik had seen a picture of Ahmad and a photo fit of the abductor on television. To his horror, the wanted people were guests in his house.

He immediately contacted the child’s father, Sahrizal Mariwan. The baby was reunited with the family some 30 hours later.

As for 10-month-old Karmila, the maid took her from the house in Port Klang.

An elderly couple later handed Karmila to the police a few days later in 2005.

In all these cases, Malaysians rallied around the distraught families after acting on information from the media. Eventually, it had been the kind Malaysians that tipped off the police.

As Wanita MCA chairman Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen put it: “Malaysia, rise to the occasion, live up to our reputation as caring nation. It is our duty to keep our children safe.

“If you see a terrified child in the arms of suspicious adults, reach out to the child. Or, if you see a child left alone on the streets, please help. The parents will be forever grateful because we choose to care.”

This Hari Raya, let it be a happy one for the Jazimin family.

Please help find Nurin.