MALAYSIAN STUDENT LAID TO REST IN LONDON
Burial of undergrad carried out hours after arrival of parents, siblings
MALAYSIAN undergraduate Muhammad Hafiz Zainal, 24, whose body was recovered from The Serpentine, Hyde Park here on Monday morning, was buried at the Garden of Peace Muslim Cemetery in Ilford, north east London yesterday.
The burial was carried out hours after the arrival of his parents, Malay Mail associate editor Zainal Epi and Zainab Mohamad, and siblings, Hanif and Hanis, from Malaysia.
Also present to send him off to his final resting place were officers from the Malaysian High Commission in London, including Charge d’Affaires Mohd Suhaimi Jaafar, Public Service Department (PSD) counsellor Khairil Azwan Abu Mansor as well as his friends.
“The process was smooth; from the time of our arrival, with the help of the High Commission and the PSD, right up to the burial. We went to the coroner’s office and then proceeded to the burial ground where the body was bathed and we held a prayer before the burial,” said Hanif.
“It was certainly a shock,” said Zainal, who added that Hafiz would contact the family back in Malaysia every day without fail.
“It was always, ‘Good morning Mama, I love you. Goodnight Mama, I love you’,” he said of his youngest son, a PSD-sponsored student studying Chemistry at Imperial College London since 2015.
“It was something that he did every day. All our children do that,” he said of his loving, closeknit family.
Zainab said she was last contacted by Hafiz about 11pm in Malaysia (3pm in London), when Hafiz was having nasi goreng and teh tarik at his favourite Malaysian restaurant, Putera
Puteri, in Queensway.
He sent her a picture of the fried rice that he was having.
“Every morning and evening he would contact us. Earlier, he told us that he wanted to eat Malaysian food,” she said.
Putera Puteri chef Mohamed Nasir Abdul Rahim said Hafiz was one of his regular customers.
He said Hafiz would patronise his restaurants two or three times a week, either at his café at Inverness Place or at the Putera Puteri Restaurant in Queensway.
“He loved nasi goreng,” said Nasir.
It was on Monday that the police contacted the Malaysian High Commission in London when Hafiz’s body was found at the Serpentine at 5.51am London time.
He was identified from the student card on him.
The lake where his body was found is not far from his university and it was understood that it was a familiar route that he would take to go from his university to his favourite restaurant.
It was understood that the London Ambulance Service retrieved the body from the lake.
“We were lucky that the body was released early when we went to see the coroner at Westminster.
“The body was released at noon and from then on, everything went smoothly; the preparation of the burial, the prayers and the burial at The Garden of Peace at 3.30pm,” said Suhaimi.
He said the coroner’s office understood that the burial needed to be done as soon as possible for Muslims.
The cause of death has yet to be released by the coroner’s office.