The group of youths is described as loud, crude and rude.

From revving motorcycles to laughing loudly until the wee hours of the morning, the youngsters – numbering between 10 and 20 – would loiter around Kampung Datuk Keramat and engage in unhealthy activities, according to people from the neighbourhood.

Kampung Datuk Keramat, a village located in the heart of the city about 5km from the landmark Petronas Twin Towers, was the scene of last Thursday’s fire at the Darul Quran Ittifaqiyah tahfiz which claimed 23 lives.

Relatives of the seven boys held in connection with the fire, as well as other villagers, claimed the suspects were part of this group.

The Star visited the homes of the suspects in the area, only 1km from the tahfiz at most, yesterday.

Pak Dol, 81, the uncle of two suspects who are brothers, said the duo and their friends would always lepak (hang around) outside his house from night until dawn, talking and laughing loudly and smoking cigarettes.

“I told them off once or twice. Cukuplah (enough already), if you say more to kids these days, they will scold you in return.

“They were also expelled from their secondary school for playing truant.

“These two boys have never addressed me as pakcik (uncle) or acknowledged my presence when they see me,” he said, adding that the boys, aged 16 and 17, were his younger brother’s children.

The two suspects also have two younger sisters and currently live with their Indonesian mother at a house that Pak Dol owns, just beside the one in which he stays.

Pak Dol said that after his brother divorced his wife, he left to work in another state, started a new family and never visited his children.

He said his brother is now a limousine driver and has two other children.

“After the divorce, I let them stay at my place.

“They were supposed to move out in December,” he added.

When Pak Dol tried calling the children’s mother through a window to speak to the reporters, a little girl replied saying there were no adults at home.

Some 10 minutes after that, a woman, believed to be the suspects’ mother, left the house in a hurry with a middle-aged man and got into a car parked outside the house.

The Star on Monday reported that Muhammad Azhari Mahmud, 40, a teacher at the tahfiz, said the teenagers could have been the same group that had quarrelled with some of his students earlier in the year over the use of a futsal court.

Over at the Datuk Keramat lake and park behind the tahfiz, cleaners and members of the public said they would see the group hanging out at a gazebo there.

A coffeeshop owner, who wished to be known only as Karim, said the parents of the seven suspects had either kept to themselves or left the neighbourhood since the boys were arrested.

Source:
courtesy of THE STAR

by The Star Reporters

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