1,509 kids have gone missing since 2020
Published on: Thursday, September 22, 2022
By: FMT
The majority of those missing were girls, says Bukit Aman CID director Abd Jalil Hassan.
PETALING JAYA: Some 1,509 children in Malaysia have gone missing between 2020 to February this year, with 85 of them yet to be located, says Bukit Aman’s criminal investigation department (CID).While some of the remaining 1,424 have been found alive and well, CID director Abd Jalil Hassan said there were also others who were found dead.
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Jalil told Utusan Malaysia that 817 cases were reported in 2020 of which 14 were still missing, 569 in 2021 with 38 still missing, and 123 in the first two months of 2022 with 33 still not found.
He said 1,113 of these cases involved girls.
“There are cases where we are forced to open investigation papers, while some were classified as sudden death.
“That’s because some victims were involved in accidents, like drowning after falling into a monsoon drain or river while playing,” he said, adding that there were murder cases, too.
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One such murder case was reported in Kuching, Sarawak, just last month. The four-year-old was not among the 1,509 children reported missing from 2020 to February 2022.
“At first, the victim was reported as missing. But after we had questioned one of the suspects who were detained, he confessed to beating up the child until the child died, and throwing the lifeless body into the sea,” he said.
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Jalil said most of the cases involved children aged 13 to 17 (1,330 cases), followed by those aged eight to 12 (138) and one to four (41).
According to him, in some cases, the children had wanted to run away from home, and some even threatened their parents against searching for them.
He noted that the enforcement of movement control orders during the pandemic had led to a drop in cases of missing children.
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