“The father, Asman, was with members of the police force and firemen who were searching for his son.
“He had taken off his shoes and was digging the earth, and pulled Samsul out,” said the victim’s aunt, Ramziah, when met at the compound of the Forensic Department at Penang Hospital here today.
She said, when Asman, 62, realised it was his son he had pulled out, he hugged the body tight.
“They (Asman and his wife) accompanied Samsul’s body in the police truck to the hospital,” she said.
Ramziah said the family had decided to take Samsul’s body back to Indonesia once the post-mortem process was completed.
He will be flown from Penang to Jakarta, before going on to Makasar, Kendari, and from there, taken by land route to Buton.
Yesterday, Asman and his wife arrived at the Penang Hospital Forensic Department at 6.20pm. Asman looked dishevelled, shoeless and his body covered in mud as he had been part of the search for Samsul, his third child.
He said he received a call from one of Samsul’s friends who asked him to go to the site of the landslide.
“His friend called me, asking me to go there. I knew about the incident after the Friday prayers, and when I arrived home, my wife was crying,” he said, adding that he went to the location in a taxi taken from their home in Sungai Nibong.
Asman said he was a permanent resident here while his son, Samsul, had just arrived and been working in Malaysia for two months.
“Samsul and his siblings lived with their grandmother in Buton Tengah, Sulawesi. Only he came to Malaysia, while the rest remained in the village,” he said.
The landslide, which was reported to have occurred at 1.56pm yesterday, has so far claimed the lives of four foreign workers, while three others were injured and another three feared to be still trapped under the earth.
Besides Samsul, the body of Bangladesh national Attrul, 35, was recovered yesterday. That of a Myanmar woman, Khin Aye Khaing, 33, was found at 1.30am today.
The body of the fourth victim, an Indonesian male, was taken out of the site at 11.55am today.
Director of the Penang Fire and Rescue Department Saadon Moktar said the body of Bahtiar, 36, was found by the sniffer dog unit.
“The body was found at 11.30am. It was recovered about 20-30 metres from where the third body was found.
“Our search was focused on the area near where the last victim was found. We believe that they were close by to each other,” he told reporters at the location today.
Saadon said for the safety of the rescue team, the search-and-rescue operations may be temporarily stopped if rain falls as the earth is soft at the location.