Samirah Muzaffar, widow of Cradle Fund CEO Nazrin Hassan, currently on trial for his June 2018 murder, faced intense scrutiny in court yesterday, with a witness claiming that she was “expressionless” when firefighters arrived at the scene of her husband’s death.
Fire official Mohamad Afzan Majid told a Kuala Lumpur High Court that after his unit was called to put out a fire at the couple’s Mutiara Damansara home, he arrived to find Samirah standing at the door. He recalled her as having “no emotions,” despite the fact that at the time, Nazrin was burning inside the house in a raging fire.
Public prosecutors had asked him to describe the scene after he and his colleagues from the Damansara Fire and Rescue Station set foot in the house:
“When the firefighting team and I arrived at the victim’s house to extinguish the fire in the master bedroom of the house, I saw the accused [Samirah] in front of the main door of the house looking expressionless.
“The accused [Samirah] also did not run away from the house when there was a fire on the main bedroom at the top floor of the house,” he told Judge Ab Karim Ab Rahman.
He went on to describe a tragedy without the usual reactions that he had become accustomed to in his 22-year career:
“I have been a firefighter for 22 years and have been on the hose reel duty for over 500 times including fires involving death.
“… and throughout my assignments, I have never seen anyone who did not cry or wail in grief or weep when it involves a victim that was burnt to death,” he recalled.
Once the fire was put out, he told the courts that Samirah suddenly began to plead with him to show her the body of her burnt, deceased husband. After checking with his superiors, Mohamad Afzan accompanied her into the room, where he told the judge, she spent a long period of time examining Nazrin’s head and moving it back and forth.
As he was standing behind Samirah, he was unable to discern any kind of expression coming from the suspect.
Mohamad Afzan gave more details on the scene at the house when he and his team arrived, saying that in addition to Samirah, there were two middle-aged women and a three-year-old child in the house.
Samirah and her two teenage sons stand accused of Nazrin’s June 14 murder, with the case being reclassified in August after investigators and a postmortem examination found evidence of foul play, including traces of petrol and head injuries.
An Indonesia maid, Eka Wahyu Lestari is still at large, and wanted in connection to the murder.
Initially blaming the entire incident on an exploding mobile phone, investigators say that a murder was committed between 11:30pm on June 13 and the early hours of June 14.
The accused have remained steadfast in declaring their innocence.
Samirah is the daughter of a well-known political scientist. She is currently being represented by Najib’s head legal counsel (and very busy man), Muhammad Shafee Abdullah.
