On 1 March 2012, in Johor, Malaysia, four-year-old Nurul Nadirah Abdullah, better known by her nickname Dirang, was abducted before she was raped and murdered by her captor at an oil plantation in Bandar Seri Alam, Masai.
[2] The offender, a 24-year-old contract labourer named Muidin Maidin, was found guilty of murdering Dirang and sentenced to death by the Johor Bahru High Court in June 2013.
[4] On 1 March 2012, at Bandar Seri Alam, Pasir Gudang in Malaysia's Johor Bahru, a four-year-old girl went missing after she left home to buy instant noodles and eggs from a nearby grocery shop.
However, Dirang, who had an older brother, did not return home after more than an hour, and her mother, out of concern, went to the grocery store to search for her daughter, but the shopkeeper informed her that she left the shop as soon as she finished buying the items.
[28] The trial court was told that Muidin had encountered Dirang on the date she went missing, while she was on the way back home from buying instant noodles and eggs.
After this, in order to destroy the evidence, Muidin set fire on her body and burnt it before he left the charred remains at the plantation, where it would eventually be found by the girl's grandfather.
Also, the reason why Muidin committed the crime was due to him feeling enraged at the fact that he was allegedly insulted and looked down upon by the victim's grandmother, and he thus killed Dirang out of his vengeful desire.
In his judgement, the judge condemned Muidin as a cold-blooded killer and the cruelest of all murderers, stating that he gave in to his "animalistic lust" and sexually assaulted Dirang before he suffocated her to death, and his conduct overall was "cruel and heartless", and the DNA tests also linked Muidin to the semen traces found on the girl's private parts, plus the traces of Dirang's clothes at the scene.
Having noted the heinous nature of the crime, Justice Abdul Halim commented that aside from the mandatory death sentence, there was no other suitable punishment he was bound to impose under the law.
Nik Mohamed Ikhwan pleaded on these grounds that justice should be tempered with mercy in his client's case, and he hence asked for Muidin to serve the maximum jail term of 40 years for the murder of Dirang.
[36] In rebuttal, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Mohd Amril Johari urged the court to maintain the death penalty, stating that it was a tragic case of a girl being abducted while on the way back home from a grocery run, and Muidin had callously raped and murdered her before burning her body to destroy the evidence, and this shocked the public so much that it remained widely discussed even after a year since it happened.
[36] After mulling over the submissions, Chief Justice Tun Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat and the other two judges - Court of Appeal President Tan Sri Abang Iskandar Abang Hashim and Federal Court judge Datuk Nordin Hassan - decided to accept the prosecution's objection and rejected Muidin's re-sentencing appeal, and condemned 36-year-old Muidin Maidin to hang for the murder of Dirang.
[50] In 2019, in light of the brutal rape-murder of 11-year-old Siti Masitah Ibrahim, Malaysian lawyer Muhammad Hafiz Hood spoke up on the topic of violent crimes on children.
Muhammad Hafiz stated that in most cases, the offenders who committed crimes against children - like rape, assault or murder - were often the people known to the victims, like friends or family members.
[51][52] Similarly, in 2023, Raja Zarith Sofiah, then Permaisuri of Johor, called upon the authorities to step up and boost the child protection system, citing the cases of Dirang and Nurul Huda Abdul Ghani (who was raped and killed in 2004) to highlight the need to deter violent crimes against children and introduce harsher laws to curb the phenomenon from arising again.