Student who faked kidnapping likely to face charges

Terengganu State CID chief ACP Wan Abdul Aziz Wan Hamzah said, the student from Polytechnic Ibrahim Sultan had said she was kidnapped in front of her rented house in Pasir Gudang last Friday.

“This is not only an offence under Section 182 of the Penal Code which carries a six month jail sentence or RM2,000 fine or both, but most importantly we had deployed our personnel and machinery elsewhere to locate the vehicle involved in the kidnapping,” he said to the media in Kuala Terengganu.

He said, the student had falsified her kidnapping because she was unable to finish an assignment.

Police investigations revealed several conflicting facts in the 20-year-old’s report who later admitted it was false.

Initially she had only wanted to deceive her friends but she was urged by her mother to lodge a police report on her kidnapping,

Wan Abdul Aziz said the student had planned the false kidnapping from the start and even left several of her personal items at her motorcycle to make her friends believe she was really kidnapped.

“She was supposed to attend a class, so with her bag and her keys still in the motorcycle, her friends actually believed she was kidnapped. We were also convinced she was kidnapped initially but after carrying out an operation last night, she came clean,” he said.

The kidnapping, which went viral on Facebook and Whatsapp, prompted a large scale police operation in five states; Terengganu, Kelantan, Perak, Kedah and Perlis.

The student, from Ampang, Selangor, claimed to have escaped her abductors 10 hours after she was taken in Johor Bahru while the truck they were travelling in stopped to refuel in Dungun, early yesterday morning.

The victim had asked the assistance from a newspaper vendor before a resident brought her to the Dungun District Police Headquarters.

In her report, she said, she failed to identify the lorry’s registration number.

She claimed her abductors were three Malay men and there were several more victims – seven children of various ethnicities - in the lorry with her, all bound for Kelantan before being brought to a neighbouring country.