Daily Lessons from Life 05 November 2009

"Thu, Nov 05, 2009 The Daily Chilli - Cruel family spends time together - in jail

CRUELTY doesn't seem to have bounds and this time, the culprits are a family of them.
On Wednesday, the last of them - 39-year-old grandmother Maselly Abdul Aziz - paid the price for going to the extreme.


She was jailed three years for pouring boiling water on maid Badingah's genitals and joining in to extract the Indonesian woman's two front teeth with pliers.

Her two older children and a woman described in court as Maselly's lesbian lover were jailed last year for their part in abusing the maid, the Singapore Straits Times reported.


Maselly, a divorcee, will start her jail sentence on Dec 28 as her elder daughter Nur Rizan Mohd Sazali, 19, would be released on home detention by then to look after her (Nur Rizan's) two-year-old son.

After the three-week trial, Singapore District Judge Jeffrey Sim was also convinced that Maselly had hit Badingah with a metal rod and threatened to kill her.


Nur Rizan had acted as the "dentist" in extracting the maid's teeth. Elsa Elyana Said, 25, a container driver and said to be Maselly's lesbian lover, held the maid's head still and forced her mouth open.

Nur Rizan was jailed 26 months - 12 months for forcibly extracting the two teeth and another 14 months for pouring boiling wax on the maid. Elsa was jailed 17 months while Nur Rizan's brother Muhammad Iz'aan, 21, a waiter, was jailed six weeks for caning Bandigah.

In the teeth extraction incident, Bandigah had been accused of theft and kept protesting her innocence. But she was not believed - and went on to lose her teeth.


In July 2007, Badingah escaped by jumping from a window of the second-storey flat near Havelock Road to seek help. She was found with numerous injuries including bruises, cuts, an infected scalp and scalding on her genitals, thigh, arms, and back."

Facts are stranger than fiction! It is hard to imagine how human being can inflict such harms on another fellow human being!

Lessons for me are:

1. if you want to get married and have kids and a family, try to do it in a mature and stable manner. Broken family cannot be good for the kids and yourself. Some who don't know who to handle such an incident can be traumatized for life and resulting in totally inhuman behavior!;

2. the family involved in brutally torturing their maid obviously is a dysfunctional one. What with the mother being a divorcee with a young lesbian lover. The daughter who is already a mother to a 2-year old at 19-year old. The ferocity and brutality exerted on 'punishing' the maid for an alleged theft are simply disturbing;

3. such crime against another human being who had to work as maid (not slave) to etch out a living must be taken seriously and the punishment must fit the crime and the message of total intolerance must be sent so that potential abusers will have no place to hide IF they decided to take the risk!

Again if we as employers have as our core values respect for people and be firm without be abusive whenever our employees made mistakes or did not perform to our reasonable expectations.

Employers bewared. You are still accountable to the laws! You are NOT a slave owner!!