Teacher to know fate soon

Education Dept panel to meet and decide on case involving death of student

BUTTERWORTH: The action to be taken on the teacher following the attempted suicide of 14-year-old M. Vasantha Piriya will be known in the coming week.

Penang Education Department deputy director Mohd Jamil Mohamed said the internal probe has been completed and if the teacher is found to have violated any standard operating procedure, the department will take the necessary action.

He said the police were not involved as it was an internal probe by the department.

“A panel in the department will meet next week and make a decision,” Mohd Jamil said yesterday.

He added that the teacher was deeply saddened by the incident and the public criticism against her.

“There has been no evidence that she was at fault, and the phone has not yet been recovered as claimed by some,” he said.

South Seberang Prai OCPD Supt Shafee Abdul Samad confirmed that the teacher’s phone, which Vasantha was accused of stealing, was still missing and declined to comment further.

Meanwhile, a blogger and social activist yesterday filed a police report against David Marshel, the president of the NGO Malaysian Tamilar Kural, for allegedly saying Vasantha was murdered.

Marshel is also a DAP municipal councillor on mainland Penang.

Ragvinder Singh Jess, who goes by the name Raggie Jessy on his blog “The Third Force”, said he wanted police to investigate Marshel for asking if the police and the Education Department were “trying to cover something up”.

“I hope the police will find out if Marshel has proof that the case is murder and ask him what his intentions were when he questioned the police and Education Department,” he said.

Ragvinder, in his police report, said that he came across an online article quoting Marshel as saying that Vasantha’s death was murder.

When contacted, Marshel said he did not use the word “murder”. “Somebody else at that press conference said it.

“I didn’t clarify the article because we were all busy over the issue then. Anyway, we have video recordings of the press conference so I am not worried about the report,” he said.

On Jan 24, Form Two student Vasantha attempted suicide by hanging herself after she was accused of stealing her teacher’s mobile phone.

The teacher had reportedly reprimanded the girl in front of her classmates and later questioned her for hours with several other teachers before she and her husband sent the student home.

Vasantha’s father R. Muniandy, 52, met the teacher later and went home, only to find the girl unconscious and hanging from a shawl tied to piping inside her bedroom. She left a note to her parents saying she did not steal the phone.

She died while in a coma in hospital on Thursday.