The police today found a skull and bits of hair believed to be that of a three-year-old girl who went missing last month and suspect that she had been murdered.

The body parts of Nur Aisyah Aleya Abdullah were found nine metres off the road in a ravine in Gunung Raya here after the police were led there by a 37-year-old man who was detained to assist the probe into the girl’s disappearance.

“We did not find the whole body, only the skull,” Langkawi District Police chief Supt Mohd Iqbal Ibrahim told reporters at the location.

Nur Aisyah Aleya was reported to have gone missing last Sunday while in the custody of a married couple who reportedly disappeared subsequently.

Her mother, Indonesian national Rosmaliah Samo, had gone to the couple’s house to look for her but was told that she had been given to be cared for by someone else.

The police launched a search for a 37-year-old man and his 40-year-old wife and yesterday picked up a married couple in Ampang, Selangor, to assist in the investigation into the girl’s disappearance.

Mohd Iqbal said the couple told them that the girl developed fits at their home here and the man patted the girl several times but she lost consciousness.

The man then stuffed the girl into a bag and took the bag in a car to the ravine in Gunung Raya and left the girl there, he said.

He said the body parts were found at a different location from where the girl was left and the bag had been discarded at another location which the police are trying to trace.

Mohd Iqbal said the girl’s mother would be called up for a DNA test to assist in the positive identification of the body parts.

- Bernama