Man, 28, on trial for murder of 4-year-old stepdaughter in Bukit Batok flat

• Muhammad Salihin Ismail is accused of hurting, ill-treating and eventually causing the death of Nursabrina Agustiani Abdullah
• He allegedly committed the acts between July 2017 and September 2018
• The trial only concerns the capital murder charge
• He allegedly grew angry when she urinated outside the toilet bowl and he then inflicted injuries that led to her death

SINGAPORE — A 28-year-old Singaporean man went on trial in the High Court on Tuesday (Feb 2) over a capital charge of murdering his four-year-old stepdaughter.

Muhammad Salihin Ismail is accused of hitting Nursabrina Agustiani Abdullah in the abdomen several times, including forcefully kicking her torso while she was on the floor on Sept 1, 2018. 

This purportedly led to extensive intra-abdominal bleeding that caused her death the next day.

The incident allegedly happened at a housing block along Bukit Batok West Avenue 9.

Salihin was angry when the girl urinated outside the toilet bowl and he then inflicted injuries on her that led to her death, the court heard. 

Prosecutors said that Salihin and his wife were trying to toilet-train the girl in preparation for school. His wife had left for work on the morning of the incident, leaving him alone with the girl and their own twin boys.

Salihin allegedly struck Nursabrina in the abdomen a few times with his fist. Later that afternoon, when she said she wanted to go to the toilet, Salihin asked her to go on her own but she urinated on the floor again.

He then purportedly pushed her on the shoulder and kicked her twice while she was on the ground, then placed her back on the toilet bowl and hit her torso a few more times.

Later that evening during dinner, Nursabrina vomited after complaining that her stomach hurt. She had eaten some mouthfuls of rice.

Salihin and his wife applied ointment to her abdomen but she continued vomiting from 1am to 8am. He then took the girl to the toilet and used his index finger to induce her to vomit as she had trouble doing so.

After vomiting again, she fell unconscious and could not be resuscitated. Salihin carried her out of the toilet and told his wife to call for an ambulance.

Two paramedics who arrived at the scene testified that they found Nursabrina in the flat, not breathing and without a pulse. 

The girl’s hands and legs were stiff and her mother was crying, one of the paramedics told the court. 

Th girl was pronounced dead in Ng Teng Fong General Hospital at about 10am. An autopsy showed that Nursabrina died from blunt force trauma to the abdomen.

Salihin also faces two other non-capital charges for hurting and ill-treating the girl at his parents’ flat along Bukit Batok Avenue 6.

Justice Pang Khang Chau ordered these two charges to be stood down for the time being, after finding that having a joint trial involving all the allegations against Salihin would prejudice his defence for the capital charge.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Senthilkumaran Sabapathy told the court on Tuesday that Nursabrina tragically died within one-and-a-half years of Salihin becoming her stepfather.

He married her mother Syabilla Syamien Riyadi in August 2016 when Nursabrina was two years old.

The mother, an Indonesian and a Singapore permanent resident, is now 24. She had Nursabrina while in a relationship with another man and gave birth to the girl when she was 17 turning 18.

Salihin was detained in the Singapore Armed Forces’ Detention Barracks in 2016 and was released in February 2017 — a few months before the alleged abuse began.

“The accused has spent more time in remand — since September 2018 — than the time he had care over Nursabrina,” DPP Senthilkumaran added during his submissions for a joint trial. 

Nursabrina called him “papa” and regarded him as her father, while he regarded her as his daughter.

The couple also had twin boys in November 2016, shortly after they married. The family of five then moved into their Bukit Batok rental flat in the first half of 2018, having stayed at his parents’ flat before that.

In the prosecution’s opening statement, DPPs Senthilkumaran and Lim Yu Hui said that Salihin “readily admitted” to the assaults in his police statements and psychiatric interviews, including intentionally inflicting the blows that caused her death.

He had told the police that he targeted the girl’s abdomen because he wanted to “teach her a lesson” for “having so much problem peeing or passing motion”.

Dr Stephen Phang, a psychiatrist from the Institute of Mental Health, said that Salihin did not suffer from any mental disorders or illnesses. He disagreed with the defence’s psychiatrist, Dr Ken Ung Eng Khean, that Salihin had an intermittent explosive disorder that would have contributed to his offences.

NON-CAPITAL CHARGES RELATED TO ABUSE 

The first of Salihin’s two non-capital charges is of voluntarily causing hurt to the girl by means of a heated substance between July and October 2017.

Salihin is said to have placed a shower head with hot water flowing out of it on her back for about five to six seconds, causing redness and scald marks.

The second charge is of ill-treatment of a child under the Children and Young Persons Act. 

Salihin allegedly slammed the girl’s head on the floor sometime between January and April 2018, causing a bruise on her forehead.

The prosecution argued that Salihin’s alleged offences were clearly of a similar nature committed against the same victim.

However, one of Salihin’s lawyers, Ms Syazana Yahya from Eugene Thuraisingam LLP, countered that the murder charge was a separate and isolated incident from the other charges.

She revealed that for the incident involving the shower head, Salihin had allegedly been angry that Nursabrina did not want to bathe in cold water. Salihin wanted her to do so in order to save on electricity costs.

He is accused of turning on the maximum temperature of the shower head and scalding the girl, Ms Syazana said.

For the ill-treatment charge, Salihin was purportedly upset that Nursabrina was hiding under the bed while he was trying to feed her.

Justice Pang ruled that allowing the trial to proceed on all three charges was “likely to embarrass and complicate the conduct of the defence”.

Ordering a separate trial on the non-capital counts would give the defence the proper chance to challenge the relevance and admissibility on the evidence for those charges, he said.

The judge also referred to the case of Azlin Arujunah and Ridzuan Mega Abdul Rahman, who were jailed for 27 years each last year for abusing their five-year-old son to death through acts such as scalding him with hot water.

Justice Pang noted that the couple both faced capital and non-capital charges in a joint trial, but the murder charge in that case arose from a series of acts spanning several weeks, with the other charges mainly taking place around the same period of time.

This demonstrated a pattern of behaviour of escalating violence. 

In Salihin’s case, the judge said that the three alleged acts did not form any pattern because they involved different modus operandi “separated by large expanses of time”.

The trial continues on Wednesday. The girl’s mother, who is serving jail time, was set to testify on Tuesday but the hearing was adjourned over a legal point.

If convicted of murder under Section 300(c) of the Penal Code, Salihin could face the death penalty or life imprisonment with caning.