The year was 1985. I was in Form 2. Our class was having a picnic trip at the Tungku beach.

It seemed like any other Sunday. We were a bunch of 12-13 year olds goofing around, making music video lip-synching to a Duran Duran song. The Bandar kids got all the good stuff including cameras and camcorders.

We noticed a helicopter flying above us. We ignored it at first, then we noticed that the helicopter was circling the area, flying low. Later, some police cars arrived. We just watched from afar but we couldn’t make out what was going on.

Soon it was time to leave. As our bus exited the beach, we passed by the scene, our little faces looking out the bus windows trying to capture whatever we could see to answer our curiosity. In that split second, we saw something in the ditch.

Later, we found out that it was a car that was in the ditch. That day, they finally found the air force pilot who was reported missing days before. He was driving home from Jerudong the night he disappeared.

The car was upside down. The man was still strapped in his seat. His hand was holding bloody tissue papers.

He spent days in the ditch while people were looking for him. No one will ever know how long he was alive before succumbing to the loss of blood.

It must be heartbreaking for families and friends of missing people who were never found, not knowing what happened to them. In Brunei, two cases of people went missing in the forest still remain a mystery until this day.

In 2014, a local cartoonist, 47 year old Mohd Arif Haji Abd Hamid, known by his pen name Abang Jit Manis went to the Teraja Forest in Labi, Belait District and never seen again. Then, in 2018, a 72 year old retired teacher, Pg Haji Damit bin Pg Hj Ahmad, never came home. He was last seen at his orchard farm in the Kampong Menengah-Bukit Sulang Area in Mukim Lamunin, Tutong District on 07 April 2018.

There are a number of possibilities of what could have happened to them. The first thing that needs to be looked at in any missing person case is their state of mind during the days and hours leading up to the time when they are found missing – whether they’ve  dropped any clues that they were not happy with their lives, wanting to get away from an unhappy marriage, or overwhelmed with debts.

The possibility of the person voluntarily missing should be ruled out first before embarking into massive and futile search operation in the jungle. Missing in the forest could be a ruse to run away and start a new life without having to explain and face their families and friends whom they irresponsibly left behind. But Brunei is so small, running away this way would mean that the person would have to leave the country through illegally crossing the border to Malaysia.

So what do we know about the two missing persons. Abang Jit Manis is quite well known.  He was actively posting in his Facebook account, he also actively contributed articles in papers and magazines, he likes photography and has a fascination with nature especially the beauty of the virgin forests and their lakes and waterfalls. Behind the facade of his lively cartoons, writings and digital footprint, people who have met Abang Jit Manis in person described him as a quiet person. It was rumoured that at the time before he disappeared he had met someone, an Iban girl from Labi. The girl, however, is already married (Red flag?).

Unlike Abang Jit Manis, Pg Haji Damit has no digital footprint apart from the online articles about him being missing. Of course there is nothing wrong about this given his age. I don’t expect him, being 72, to have a Facebook account. But as in other pensioners in the Tutong District, he is well known especially to the people of Lamunin. He shared the same favourite pastime as other senior citizens in the Mukim, which is managing orchards. Dusun buah-buahan as they called it. Pg Haji Damit has his own orchard farm which he maintained with the help of two Indonesian workers whom he employed. He must be doing great financially if he can afford to employ two workers. Because of this, rumours have emerged that the married with kids Pg Hj Damit has been preyed upon by a foreign worker lady (Red flag?).

Lets say that the two missing persons did not voluntarily gone missing. The other possibility would be that they got lost in the jungle, a possibility which I think can be quickly dismissed. Both are familiar with the respective area that they were last seen at. Abang Jit Manis frequented the Labi area allegedly having discreet rendezvous with the said girl. While Pg Haji Damit knew his orchard like the back of his hand. Furthermore, the GRU’s sniffer dogs, which were involved in the search operations, are extremely well trained and would have been able to track them down in the jungle, whether they were alive or dead.

If they did not voluntarily go missing and did not get lost in the jungle, that would leave us with the possibility of foul play which may involve the victims being moved, whether kidnapped or murdered, to a secondary crime scene away from the searched area. This is a scary possibility to go with, but rightfully, there should not be any rock left unturned.

The lack of missing people posters and publicity would mean that as the years passed by, the cases would soon be forgotten and the families are forced to settle with the idea that their missing loved ones could be dead or have stumbled upon a supernatural parallel universe and don’t want to leave or couldn’t find their way out.

One thing for sure, someone somewhere out there knew something. How about the Labi girl that Abang Jit Manis has been seeing? She must knew something. The two Indonesian foreign workers who were at the orchard with Pg Haji Damit the day he disappeared. They must knew something. Perhaps, offering financial reward for information could help someone break their silence.

Whatever fate that befell them, it is hoped that the mystery surrounding their disappearances can be solved so that their families can have closure and move on with their lives.

Update [Nov 2019]: Pg Hj Damit has been located. Is he alive? YES. Was he voluntarily missing? YES. The amount of efforts, the manpower involved, the days spent looking for him, the anguish his family went through, were pointless because of this. Did he leave the country? YES. This raised a couple of questions… did the police and his family members even check if his passport was missing too? Did they even immediately get the airport and land border posts officials to be alert should his passport is used? BEATS ME. Did his two Indonesian workers know something? YES. Should the public be informed that he was found? DEFINITELY YES. Anyways, Im glad that he is still alive and I’m sure his family is relieved too about that. Turned out that he went to Indonesia and YES he brought his passport along. Wak…wak…waaak.

This is part of the bizarre firsts coverage but I thought this piece deserves its own block. I watched a lot of crime, forensic and investigative cases on TV and youtube. One way to pull off a perfect crime is when there is no body. Although this case did not involve foul play, it ticked some of the boxes for sloppy ways to conceal a dead body.

In 2013, what began to be a regular covert rendezvous between two secret lovers became snafu when the woman, 39 year old, just dropped dead (after some heavy breathing and coughing). In a panic, instead of just fleeing the scene, the guy decided that he must hide the body. This thing happened at a house in Kg Salambigar which belonged the lady’s friend. The lady has the key to the house which the house owner was well aware of. At that time, the owner of the house was away for the holidays.

Question: It will not be too puzzling for the lady to be in the house since it was her friend’s and she has the key. She could be just checking if the house was not broken into, or perhaps she could just be stopping by for a toilet break or watering the plants. Why didn’t he just flee, wipe his fingerprints, clean the house, get rid of anything in contact with his DNA and leave the body there to be found? My guess is that in his head, if there was no body to see or to be found, then he can convince himself that it was just a bad bad dream and nothing had ever happened.

Maybe after cursing shit shit shit many times, my guess is the first thing he did was to find a bedsheet, blanket, garbage bag or carpet to cover the body, especially the face. Since it was still daylight, carrying the body to the car was not a good idea. And this is an average sized 40+ year old local man who obviously couldn’t carry the body on his shoulder. In this kind of situation, a psychopath killer’s solution will be to use a large trolley bag, or (if he has a few hours to spare) hack the body in the bathtub and dispose the parts at different locations.

Now, back to the elephant in the room – the dead body. By a stroke of luck (at least for him), there happened to be a 10-foot ditch within the compound of the house. But seriously, 10 feet is quite deep. Why would there be a ditch that deep near a house?? Desperate to get the body “out of sight” he put it in the ditch and covered the ditch with some zinc roofing sheets which happened to be lying nearby and some shrubs. This was where he had his first moment of stupidity during the entire situation. While putting bodies under the ground is one popular method of hiding dead bodies, people only do that either at properties that they own, abandoned places, somewhere in the jungle or anywhere where you don’t expect people to have reason to go to. But the genius chose to put the body in the ditch near the house owned by the lady’s friend who would return home from holidays in a few days and certainly would smell the stench or at least notice that something was different with the ditch.

Getting rid of the car was easy. He just drove it to a nearby electrical power station and walked back to the house where he took his car and went home. Perhaps during the drive home he just realised about the stench that would come out from the body eventually decomposing. So three days later he came back to the house to do what became his second moment of stupidity. When planning to deny being involved in anything wrong or illegal, the best thing is to minimise the number of people involved in the scheme whether knowingly or unknowingly. But the genius had to order for delivery truckloads of stones and cement to be poured in the ditch. He paid for them using the money from the deceased handbag, some nerve! There was no point of him using a fake name when in making the order he was using his own phone that revealed his phone number. He also interacted with the truck drivers showing them where to dump the load allowing them to see his face.

So there you go. His sloppiness led to his arrest just five days after the unfortunate incident. In 2014, he was sentenced to six month jail term by the Magistrate Court, and a life sentence with no possibility of parole by his wife…just saying….

Sad ending to this story, in 2015 the man passed away due to poor health.