Pregnant woman dies after thieves pull her off motorcycle

From Thestar

by FARIK ZOLKEPLI

JOHOR BARU: The killers on motorcycles have done it again — this time, snatch thieves took two lives when they tried to rob pregnant Jamilah Selamat.

Jamilah, 31, suffered severe head injuries after falling from her motorcycle on Sunday. She died at the Sultanah Aminah Hospital at 7.30am yesterday without regaining consciousness.

Her husband of seven months, trader Razali Ahmad, 41, was a distraught man yesterday.

For him, the tragedy was harder to take because he had just started to taste happiness again after five years when his first wife died of cancer.

The tragedy also leaves Jamilah’s two children from her first marriage — Norasyikin Salleh, seven, and Mohd Khairi Ridwan Salleh, five — without their mother. They looked dazed and clung to their crying stepfather.

Razali said he was told by an eyewitness — his older brother’s friend — that his wife had hit the pavement face first and did not move after that.

“The witness told me that he saw two men on a motorcycle flee the scene immediately after Jamilah fell, and her bag was nowhere to be seen,” he told reporters at the hospital mortuary yesterday.

Razali said Jamilah, a handicraft dealer, was on her way home to Taman Mekar after work that day.

Jamilah had lost her handbag to snatch thieves last year but escaped unharmed. A friend advised her to twirl the handbag around the rearview mirror for a tighter hold.

That move may have been fatal.

When the snatch thieves grabbed Jamilah’s bag, they pulled her motorcycle, causing Jamilah to fall.

“I never thought that I would lose her this way. We were expecting our child, we have only been married for seven months ... I lost my first wife to bone cancer and now, I have lost Jamilah and baby,” he said.

Razali has two teenage children from his previous marriage.

Jamilah and the unborn child were buried at the Ayer Hitam cemetery yesterday.

Batu Pahat OCPD Asst Comm Ibrahim Arif confirmed police received a report on the incident.

Eyewitnesses are urged to contact the police hotline at 07-2212999.

In 2004, a Nanyang Siang Pau clerk, Chong Fee Cheng, 37, died after she lapsed into a coma following a snatch theft in Taman Molek, Johor Bahru.

In December last year, snatch theft victim Lim See Nya, 58, was run over by a three-tonne truck when she lost her balance and fell onto the road, after a motorcycle pillion rider grabbed her handbag in Bukit Mertajam.