KOTA KINABALU: A glimpse of a daughter’s love and distress, was revealed in court as six of 42 audio recordings of exchanges between the late Zara Qairina Mahathir and her mother were played before the Coroner.
Among the moments played were Zara Qairina expressing her love and longing for her mother, Noraidah Lamat, as well as her frustration over losing money.
“Bye, sayang, cinta, rindumu. Muah. I love you,” Zara Qairina was heard saying, to which Noraidah tenderly replied, “I love you, Ra. Bye, Ra.”
Noraidah’s lawyer, Shahlan Jufri, explained that only a handful of recordings were selected for the Coroner’s Court hearing, as playing all 42 would take nearly two hours.
He explained that each recording lasted up to four minutes.
Shahlan then directed a question to the 70th witness, police Computer Crime Investigation Unit forensic analyst ASP Mohamad Zaidi Abu Hassan.
He asked whether the conversation recordings had ever been extracted during the analysis of a piece of evidence marked as WK11. Mohamad Zaidi said he only extracted recordings of conversations from WhatsApp, and the ones played in court could not be retrieved using the analysis software he employed.
“I only extracted these conversation recordings from WhatsApp.
“They could not be extracted through my analysis software,” he said before Coroner Amir Shah Amir Hassan. The witness said he “did not find” the conversation recordings between Zara Qairina and her mother in the results of his analysis because it was limited to audio from WhatsApp and other social media platforms.
He confirmed that the audio recordings played in court were authentic, Bernama reported.
However, he added that if a re-analysis were to be conducted, the process would take approximately three to four hours, in addition to going through the required report preparation procedures.
Zara Qairina, 13, died on July 17, 2025. at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where she had been admitted a day earlier after being found unconscious near a drain at her school hostel in Papar at 4am.
The Attorney General’s Chambers ordered her remains exhumed for a post-mortem on Aug 8, 2025, before announcing a formal inquest into her death on Aug 13.
The hearing continues today.
