KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 25 — It has emerged that the wife of the Indonesian-born taxi driver charged with murdering Malaysian consulate driver Mohd Shah Saemin had worked together with the victim and were described as “close”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported today.
The newspaper also reported that she has now been charged as an accessory after the fact, following the arrest of her husband Hazairin Iskandar.
Her son Andrew was also detained in Singapore after arriving there after a flight from Sydney.
The newspaper claimed from interviews with colleagues of Mohd Shah and Nita Eriza Iskandar, an accounts clerk at the consulate, the two were very close and would often have lunch together.
According to an account of events published by the Sydney Morning Herald, the last time Mohd Shah spoke to Nita, he was screaming for help down the telephone after being set upon by two men with a hammer on Sunday night outside his home in Marion Street, Leichhardt, Sydney.
The newspaper reported that he called to a woman standing nearby, who threw her body over him in the hope it would stop the attack.
Nita would arrive later at the scene as police tried in vain to revive him.
Nita was charged yesterday with being an accessory after the fact to murder and hindering a police investigation, the newspaper reported.
She was refused bail and will appear in Newtown local court today.
Colleagues and neighbours were said to have been taken aback at the developments in what was first thought to be a road rage investigation.
The details emerging from the case will also put to rest suspicions that the incident was a hate crime linked to racism, which the New Straits Times suggested in an editorial yesterday.
The NST had written that Mohd Shah’s murder had brought home this rising scourge (of race hate).
In the Sydney Morning Herald story, it was reported that Nita, an Indonesian-born Australian citizen, had worked at the consulate for about 10 years and has been on leave since Monday.
Mohd Shah began working at the consulate three years ago after moving to Australia in 2000.
‘‘All these twist of events are confusing,’’ the consulate director Mohd Nasir Abu Hassan told the newspaper.
‘‘We’re not suspicious of people when they hold hands or whatever. That’s how we’re taught.
‘‘They had no other relationship that we know of, but out of work we do not know.’’
The newspaper also reported that Nita had attended an embalming service to prepare Mohd Shah’s body at Lakemba mosque before her arrest.
She had told workmates she would pay for the body’s repatriation and accompany it home to Malaysia. Her husband had said that he planned to go with her.
He elected not to face the magistrate, Christopher Longley, at Burwood local court yesterday. Bail was refused and the matter adjourned until April 20.
‘‘If he did that I never forgive him,’’ Nita also told Channel 10 of her husband yesterday.
By the time the interview went to air, she too was under arrest and police were arranging for her son’s return to Australia.
The wooden coffin was carried into Lakemba mosque last night where it was prayed over before being flown to Malaysia today, the newspaper reported.
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