The morning of October 7th, 2000, began like any other for 24-year-old Suzie. She kissed her roommate goodbye, walked out of their rented home in Kampong Baru, and boarded the 7:45 express bus to Klang, where she worked as a computer engineer at the Pantai Medical Center. She loved that job. She had just returned from England, where she had graduated, and was newly engaged.
Everything was finally falling into place. As the bus made its stops, passengers filed off one by one. Soon, only Suzie and one other passenger remained. That should have been normal.
But then the driver, 34-year-old Hannafi Mat Hassan, veered off his usual route and headed down Jalan Bukit Tinggi. Suzie knew something was terribly wrong. She tried to call for help, but the driver stopped the bus and attacked her, and during the struggle, he overpowered her. He sexually assaulted her in the front and the back of the bus.
But there were witnesses. Eighteen-year-old A. Devan was riding his bicycle on his way to a tuition center when he saw Suzie struggling inside, topless. When he got closer, he saw Hannafi pulling up his pants.
Three men on motorcycles, including a man in his 50s and a driving school instructor, also saw what was happening. When Hannafi tried to flee, all four men chased after him. Hannafi drove into a residential neighborhood, turned off on Jalan Sembawang, and then noticed he had been caught up with. He reversed the bus, sped back, and parked it in a secluded area of Bandar Bukit Tinggi, an upscale neighborhood about five kilometers south.
There, he sexually assaulted Suzie again before strangling her to death with her own hijab. He threw her naked body from the bus near a construction site, where a good Samaritan found her. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Haleem bin Mansar, counted at least 44 injuries covering her body, including a broken neck.
She had been sexually assaulted before her death, and male DNA was recovered. The official cause of death was strangulation and blunt force trauma. Homicide. Her body was returned to her family and buried in Kangar.
Hannafi Mat Hassan was no first-time offender. He had been arrested in 1988 for assaulting one of his ex-wives. In 1994, he was charged with criminal breach of trust. In 1996, he was convicted of robbery with hurt, essentially aggravated robbery, and served 30 months in prison with two lashes of the cane.
He had been married four times, and three of his marriages had ended. He had three daughters. At the time of Suzie’s murder, his fourth wife was expecting their son. He had only been on the bus driving job for 10 days.
Police arrested him three days later at the North Klang bus terminal. Over 55 witnesses were summoned to testify. Hannafi confessed to everything, claiming he simply could not resist attacking Suzie because of her beauty. He even led police to the spot where he had hidden her purse in a drain, and it was still there with all her personal documents.
A sad twist of fate: his wife went into premature labor on the very day her husband murdered Suzie. Their baby boy died on the same day his father was arrested. After being officially charged with murder and sexual assault, Hannafi pleaded not guilty. According to reports, he smirked as his charges were read.
His trial began on March 12th, 2001, at the Shah Alam High Court and lasted 65 days. The evidence against him was so overwhelming that at several points, his own lawyers wanted to stop defending him. Taking the stand in his own defense, Hannafi spun a ridiculous tale. He claimed Suzie had gotten off the bus at her intended destination.
He claimed a friend boarded the bus, that they were talking, and that he nearly ran over a cyclist, A. Devan, who, mind you, had already testified against him. He said he sped away for his own safety after seeing a group of men with sticks and iron rods chasing the bus. But he could not explain how his male DNA was found on Suzie’s body.
On April 26th, 2002, Justice Mohd Hishimudin bin Mohd Yunus delivered the verdict. Hannafi was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. He was also found guilty of sexual assault and given 20 years with 12 strokes of the cane. Suzie’s brother, Muhammad Muhari, and her friend Shahrin Abdul Wahed were present.
Both were satisfied. Hannafi appealed. His first appeal was denied on August 13th, 2005. The Federal Court of Malaysia upheld the sentence on December 12th, 2006.
He then asked the Sultan of Selangor for a royal pardon. That too was denied. Hannafi’s 80-year-old mother publicly supported the rulings and apologized to Suzie’s family. “No one was above the law,” she said.
One of his ex-wives asked that he be executed swiftly so his children wouldn’t have to learn their father was a murderer. Held at the Kajang prison, awaiting the gallows, Hannafi was executed by hanging on December 19th, 2008. When the news reached Suzie’s family, they were glad justice was finally carried out. Her father, Mokhtar Ibrahim, never forgave Hannafi, but he did express sympathy for the family Hannafi left behind.
In the wake of Suzie’s death, Malaysia was shocked. People called for changes. It was proposed that buses switch from tinted windows to larger, clearer panes to discourage crime. There were also calls to register bus drivers with criminal records.
Because of the nature of the crime and that it occurred on a bus, Suzie has been referred to as Malaysia’s Nirbhaya. Her murder became a call to action to protect women and girls from violence. That same month Suzie was attacked, an even younger victim slipped through the cracks. A five-year-old girl named Norishah Hidayah was sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped in a rooftop water tank.
The culprit was her 12-year-old neighbor. Sadly, not much else is known about her case. Seven years later, on September 17th, 2007, an eight-year-old girl named Nurin Anis Jaslina binti Jazimin was found. Her body was discovered in a gym bag, nude, stuffed in a fetal position, inside a yoga bag left in a parking lot in Petaling Jaya.
A shopkeeper found her. At the autopsy, it was determined she had been dead for over six hours before she was found. She had a bacterial infection caused by intestines that had ruptured. She had been sexually assaulted with a cucumber and an eggplant, which were still inside her body.
The trauma caused her bowels to rupture, which led to the infection. Her body had changed so much after death that her parents could not recognize her; identification was only possible through DNA. Nurin had gone missing on the evening of August 16th, 2007. She had headed to a night market near her home to buy a hair clip.
When she never returned, her parents filed a missing person’s report. The news media and NGOs helped search for her. Police eventually obtained CCTV footage from the night she disappeared, showing her being dragged into a white van. Citizens across Malaysia dubbed the case the country’s most horrifying crime in years.
Then-Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi considered publicizing a list of convicted offenders who had committed crimes against children. The government planned a registry, but it never came to pass. In a surprising and cruel twist, the public and the Inspector General, Musa Hassan, wanted to charge Nurin’s parents with negligence under Section 33 of the Child Act of 2001. The suggestion sparked public outcry.
Malaysia Crime Prevention Foundation chairman Lee Lam Thye said punishing the parents would be unfair and certainly not in the interest of justice. There were several arrests in connection to Nurin’s murder. None led to a conviction. Federal agents arrested four men and one woman between the ages of 27 and 35 during a raid.
The woman was released; the men were held for three days before being let go due to lack of evidence. Police arrested an Indonesian woman who tried to swallow a SIM card when confronted. Nothing came of it. A 10,000 ringgit reward was offered, and an anonymous businessman matched it, bringing the total to 20,000 ringgit.
In October 2007, CCTV footage from the exact parking lot where the gym bag was found was sent to the American FBI for review. The first clip, recorded around 1 p. m. on September 16th, captured a motorcyclist leaving the bag with Nurin’s body.
An hour later, a second clip captured a woman wandering the lot until she was picked up by three men. Even after the FBI enhanced the footage, they could not identify the motorcyclist or the license plate. Nurin was buried in a Muslim cemetery in the Taman Ibu Kota neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur on September 21st, 2007. The case went cold.
In 2018, her father begged police to reopen the case using the latest technology. As of today, the monster or monsters responsible for Nurin’s murder are still at large. The question hangs over everything: with changes in technology, will these cases ever be solved?
And for Suzie, whose killer was brought to justice, the fear remains that the innocent still suffer while the guilty walk free.
