2009/03/05
Man splashes acid on teacher
KUALA LUMPUR: She saw a man pouring a red liquid into a polystyrene cup but she never suspected he would throw it at her.
Now, the 25-year-old teacher risks losing her sight in her right eye.Relating the incident yesterday, the teacher said she was waiting for her husband outside her school compound, in Bangsar, on Tuesday afternoon, when she noticed a man on a motorcycle ."Clad in dark clothing and a full-face helmet, he stopped several metres away from me. "He then took out a water bottle containing a red-coloured liquid and poured some of it into a polystyrene cup.
"I thought he was just a parent waiting to fetch his child," said the teacher, who did not want to be named. She had been teaching English at the secondary school for the past year.Minutes later, the man rode past and splashed the contents of the cup on her face, causing a burning sensation in her eye and face."The feeling only subsided after 15 minutes of washing in the school bathroom," she said, adding that the liquid also burnt holes in her bra and caused burns on her neck and chest.She was taken to the University Malaya Medical Centre by her husband, a police Lance Corporal attached to the Brickfields police headquarters."I was told that 70 per cent of my cornea is burnt and I don't know when I will recover," said the teacher at her Pantai Dalam home.She said doctors could not determine what had been thrown on her face as most of it had been washed off when she sought treatment.She said she might be a victim of mistaken identity as she resembled the school's discipline teacher."The discipline teacher reprimanded a student for being involved in a fight outside the school, a day before the incident. "I don't know if that had anything to do with the liquid being splashed on my face." Brickfields police chief Assistant Commissioner Wan Abdul Bari Wan Abdul Khalid said police had recorded a statement from the woman.
