The shophouses near the wooden bridge.
SIBU: A female teacher of a primary school here was robbed and slightly injured on Thursday night after she fell victim to an ambush by two robbers at a remote wooden bridge along Teku Road.
In the 9pm incident, the teacher was taking a short cut home alone through a jungle earth road.
As she was crossing the wooden bridge, she saw a bucket which blocked her path.
After stopping her car and in the midst of moving the bucket aside, two men came out from nowhere and snatched her handbag which contained cash and a handphone. She estimated her losses to be about RM3,000.
Following that, she lodged a police report the same night. The police are now hunting for the robbers.
According to the teacher in her 40s, the jungle path was her normal route home.
She said her mother had often been worried that she drove home alone and reminded her to call her if she encountered danger, as the jungle road was dark and remote with no streetlight.
As there were always people fishing in the stream at where the wooden bridge was, she did not feel that there was any danger in driving along the jungle road at night.
She said those fishing there often left their gear on the bridge, and when she found it blocking her way, she would honk and they would remove the gear to let her pass.
“Therefore, when I saw the bucket on the bridge that night, I did not feel something amiss and did not alert my mother.
“As usual, I honked, but there was no one picking up the bucket. I got down to remove it.”
She said she was returning to her car when two men grabbed her.
“One grabbed my neck and the other my legs to prevent me from running. I was scared. I asked them to take my valuables and leave me alone. I spoke in Bahasa Malaysia. They kept silent.”
She said one of them ran to his motorcycle.
“I thought he was fetching a weapon to attack me. Fortunately, I could slip my hand into my car and I started honking,” she recalled, which caught the attention of the people in the new shophouses 500 metres away.
The robbers then fled, taking her handbag, she said.
She sustained bruises and cuts on both her legs and hands.