The mother of late Form One student Zara Qairina testified at the Kota Kinabalu Coroner’s Court about her daughter’s friendship notebooks and complaints of hostel bullying.
KOTA KINABALU: The notebooks belonging to the late Zara Qairina Mahathir, which were referred to as her “diaries”, were not daily journals in the conventional sense but personal writings about friendships and experiences with her peers, her mother told the inquest today.
Noraidah Lamat, 46, said her daughter began writing in several notebooks around 2021 at the encouragement of a Malay language teacher at Sekolah Kebangsaan Pantai, Sipitang, to help improve and neaten her handwriting.
“Zara had several notebooks, each associated with a particular friend. Their contents mainly revolved around friendships and experiences with those friends,” she said while reading her witness statement before Coroner Amir Shah Amir Hassan.
The 82nd witness said Zara sometimes shared the notebooks with her friends and allowed them to leave messages in them. She had also briefly read some of the contents, which she said were simply accounts of friendship.
However, Noraidah told the inquest that Zara had complained several times about bullying, harassment and unpleasant treatment by other students while staying at the hostel of Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Agama (SMKA) Tun Datu Mustapha, Papar.
She said Zara had raised the complaints either during phone calls or when she returned home, including about senior students who disliked her and had labelled her with terms such as “perasan cantik”, “sok-sok cantik” and “a pick me girl”.
Noraidah said that despite experiencing teasing and bullying at the hostel, Zara had never appeared distressed before the incident.
Recalling the last time Zara came home on July 13, 2025, Noraidah said her daughter appeared cheerful and emotionally and behaviourally normal, although they had discussed the issue of harassment by senior students at the hostel and preparations for her return.
She said she last saw Zara on the same day when she took her back to the hostel, while her last call from her daughter was at 8.53 pm on July 14, 2025.
Noraidah said that at about 4.37 am on July 16, she received a call from a teacher informing her that Zara had been found “lying” on the floor and had been taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital 1.
The call left her shocked, panicked and distraught as she tried to understand what had happened to her daughter and how to get to the hospital.
She said several school teachers who visited her at the hospital and at home did not disclose what had actually happened despite being asked, while one of them even asked her not to publicise the incident.
“I was also never informed about the internal investigation conducted by the school into the incident on the night of July 15, 2025. I only learned about the internal investigation during these inquest proceedings,” she said.
Concluding her witness statement, which took about 45 minutes to read, Noraidah said she had been very close to Zara and loved her only child deeply.
Zara Qairina died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital on July 17, 2025, a day after the Form One student was found unconscious near a drain at her school hostel in the early hours of the morning.
