Four Western tourists accused of being part of a group who posed nude at the top of Malaysia’s Mount Kinabalu have appeared in court in Sabah state.
Authorities said the two Canadians, a Briton and a Dutchman may be charged with causing public nuisance.
Mt Kinabalu was hit by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake last Friday which left 18 people dead, including children.
A senior minister last week said the tourists had angered the spirits of the mountain, which is considered sacred.
Six people sought
Ranau district police chief Mohd Farhan Lee Abdullah confirmed to the BBC that the authorities had arrested a British woman at Tawau airport in Sabah on Tuesday.
The two Canadians, who are siblings, and the Dutchman turned themselves in to police on the same day.
Their lawyer, Ronny Cham, told the BBC’s Jennifer Pak that he had requested the four be held apart from other detainees in order to ensure their safety.
A candle-lit vigil was held on Tuesday for the victims of the Mount Kinabalu earthquake
The group appeared in court on Wednesday to have their remand extended, according to Malaysian newspaper The Star. They will now be held until Saturday while police continue their investigation.
Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman, Sabah’s police commissioner, was quoted by AFP news agency as saying that the authorities may charge them with causing a public nuisance.
He said they were still looking for six other tourists from the same group “and we will catch them”.
The father of the British tourist who has been arrested, Eleanor Hawkins from the English city of Derby, said he was extremely worried about her. “I have got every faith in [Malaysia’s] judicial system. I just hope they don’t make an example of them,” Tim Hawkins told the Guardian newspaper.
‘Disrespect’
The group of 10 foreigners had allegedly stripped naked and posed for pictures on 30 May. They were also said to have urinated on the mountain.
The Muslim-majority country is socially conservative, and Mount Kinabalu is also considered sacred by Sabah’s Kadazan Dusun tribe.
Pictures posted on social media angered many in Malaysia, but public sentiment intensified after the quake.
Why is Kinabalu sacred?
Sabah’s Kadazan Dusun tribe believe the mountain houses the spirits of their dead ancestors.
The name Kinabalu is derived from the tribe’s phrase “Aki Nabalu”, which means resting place of the dead.
Climbers are told by guides, many of whom are Kadazan Dusun, to treat the mountain with respect and to refrain from shouting, screaming or cursing at it.
Every December the tribe conducts a ritual called the Monolob to appease the spirits and allow climbers to continue visiting the mountain.
A priestess, called a Bobolian, makes an offering of seven white chickens accompanied by seven chicken eggs, betel nuts, tobacco, limestone powder, and betel plant leaves. The Bobolian leads a chant and the chickens are then slaughtered, cooked, and given to the ceremony participants.
In the past, this ceremony was conducted before every ascent, and climbers used the cooked meat as rations for their journey.
Last weekend, Sabah’s deputy chief minister, Joseph Pairin Kitingan, had linked the earthquake to the tourists’ act. He said the tragedy was a “confirmation” that they had showed “disrespect” to the mountain.
Sabah’s tourism minister, Masidi Manjun, said later that this idea was “misconstrued”, but added that the tourists’ actions “were against the people of the largest tribe in Sabah”.
Some officials have demanded that the foreigners be tried in a native court for flouting local customs.
Mr Masidi said on Wednesday that searchers had found the bodies of the last two missing people.
Mourners left tributes to primary school victims in Singapore over the weekend
Singapore’s education ministry identified the two bodies as pupil Navdeep Singh Jaryal Raj Kumar and teacher Mohammad Ghazi Bin Mohamed.
They were part of a group from Tanjong Katong Primary School who were climbing the mountain with guides when the earthquake struck. Seven pupils, two teachers and a guide were killed.
Others killed included Malaysians and citizens from China, Japan and the Philippines.
All of us tried to stay positive, hoping that you’ll come home soon. Unfortunately, God loves you more and I’m sure you’re in a much better place now.
Thank you for being the great person that you are. You were always the humble one in the team, yet you played like a superstar. You never fail to encourage me whenever we got the chance to play together.
You will be remembered as a great teacher who not only made an impact in your students’ lives, but one who sacrificed his life to save theirs. Goodbye my friend. May your soul rest in peace.
“Truly, to Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return.”
A website set up on Wednesday (June 10) by friends of the late Tanjong Katong Primary School (TKPS) teacher Mohammad Ghazi Mohamed, has raised more than $38,000 by Thursday afternoon.
All proceeds from the online “Remembering Ghazi” page will go to Mr Ghazi’s wife, who is also a teacher, and their three children, with the youngest being just a year old.
However, the organisers have decided to cease the campaign on Thursday, 3.30pm, so that they can keep the donations “within a manageable amount”.
The administrative aspects of the fundraiser will be managed by a colleague of Mr Ghazi’s wife, Mr Chua Wee Nam, who is the Head of Department for Discipline at East View Secondary School.
The group also hopes “to direct this positive energy to a formal charity organisation” to collect donations for others affected by the Mount Kinabalu tragedy.
They also requested the public to respect the privacy of the family.
The campaign was started by a group of about 20 hockey and football players who knew Mr Ghazi, 35, through school, university or clubs, said one of the campaign organisers, Mr Hoirul Hafiidz.
The group had kept each other updated via a mobile group chat when news broke that Mr Ghazi, who was leading pupils up Mount Kinabalu when the 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck, was missing.
When Mr Ghazi’s body was identified on Wednesday through fingerprinting and personal belongings, they “decided to do something to help instead of just talking about it”, Mr Hoirul said.
Mr Ghazi was remembered by friends, former students and colleagues on Wednesday at the TKPS tribute centre.
He was an avid hockey player who coached the TKPS hockey team, influencing at least one student to take up the sport and later become a national player.
The June 5 earthquake that struck Sabah claimed the lives of 10 people from Singapore – seven pupils and two teachers from TKPS, and the adventure guide who accompanied them on their learning journey to Mount Kinabalu.
Education Minister Heng Swee Keat expressed his condolences in a Facebook post on Wednesday, and said that the opening hours of the tribute site at TKPS will be extended by two hours to 9pm. Thursday (June 11) is the last day for members of the public to pay their respects to the victims of the earthquake.
Dearest, dearest Ghazi…
My rock, my sunshine, my partner-in-crime…
Only you can make me dredge up an old unflattering photo of myself and post it for all the world to see.
There are no words to describe the pain I feel right now.
So I shall just say that I love you, so very very much.
Goodbye my dear brother.
Thank you for the great times we’ve had together.
Till we meet again.
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Whether it is kayaking or trekking, students at Raffles Institution have a variety of choices when it comes to leadership courses. But before embarking on any expedition, the school will conduct a rigorous risk management assessment.
Said Head of Department at the Raffles Institute for Experential Learning Kuak Nam Jin: “MOE (Ministry of Education) has a very well-established risk management matrix. We follow that very closely. We go on recce trips to look at the place. The staff would often embark on the entire route of the destination to find out how vigorous or intense it is. We have to find out in history whether other schools have used it before, what is the feedback?”
Once a place has been chosen, training to prepare the students physically for the trip begins, according to Mr Kuak: “We would prepare our students physically for the trip which often involves general physical conditioning pretty much like PE conditioning. And then there’s also specific training.
“For instance if you are climbing a mountain, then you really need to get students to be climbing the stairs, carrying their backpack so that they develop the right type of muscles in the physical conditions to allow them to perform on the mountain.”
The safety of such expeditions is in the spotlight, in the wake of a tragedy where six students and a teacher from Tanjong Katong Primary School died, while climbing on Mount Kinabalu in Sabah as part of an overseas learning journey, called the Omega Challenge last week. Their Singaporean adventure guide was killed as well, and a teacher and a student from the school are still missing.
Another school head said scenario training will be conducted to equip students with necessary skills to react to emergencies – such as dealing with an injury.
“We have to think about many categories of risk, covering issues from whether the children have enough food and water, to where the nearest medical facilities are,” said Ms Haslindah Bahrom, Vice-Principal and Chief Safety Officer at Eunos Primary School. “If there are possible risks, we discuss how to mitigate them. It’s not just for overseas excursions. We do this for learning journeys within Singapore – and even for activities within school, like Sports Day and carrying out experiments in our Science labs.”
The onus is also on educators to assess the student’s ability for such physically demanding programmes.
Said Ms Haslindah: “As you train your students, you are able to identify which students are having trouble keeping up with the training or they may have old injuries that may come back to haunt them or they are struggling with that. I think as educators you have to make a decision whether the student should drop out of the programme or we make a decision to moderate the intensity of the programme so that every student can participate in the programme.”
HOLISTIC LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Educators encourage parents to send their children on overseas expeditions as they contribute to a holistic learning experience. Some students who took up the Omega Challenge at Tanjong Katong Primary told Channel NewsAsia that the expedition had taught them valuable life skills.
“It teaches you perseverance and discipline and it pushes your limits and tests them,” said one of them, Zara Karim. “Mount Kinabalu taught me a lot of skills like how to work with people, how to communicate. And that’s been very useful in project work and working within CCA with people.”
The students added that the six-month training before the expedition was sufficient to prepare them for the physical challenges.
