On 2 September 2018, four-year-old Nursabrina Agustiani Abdullah (2014 – 2 September 2018), also known as Sabrina, died from blunt force trauma to the abdomen after her stepfather physically assaulted her by pushing her and kicking her in the stomach twice, which resulted in extensive intra-abdominal bleeding that caused the girl to die a day after the assault despite her parents' attempt to resuscitate her. Sabrina's stepfather, 25-year-old Muhammad Salihin bin Ismail, was later arrested and charged with murder, a crime that warrants the death penalty in Singapore. Salihin was also charged with having inflicted physical abuse on the girl twice between July 2017 and April 2018.
During his 2021 murder trial, Salihin admitted to the assault but stated that he never intended to kill Sabrina or kick Sabrina to result in her death, recounting that after his (and his wife's) unsuccessful attempts to toilet-train Sabrina in preparation for school, he was so enraged that he kicked at Sabrina twice but never intended for the blows to specifically hit his stepdaughter's stomach and cause severe injury to lead to her death. Despite the prosecution's arguments that Salihin had committed murder by intentionally causing the fatal abdominal injuries on Sabrina during his kicking, the judge found that Salihin never intended to cause his stepdaughter's death through the fatal injuries despite the deliberateness of the assault. Therefore, Salihin was convicted of voluntarily causing grievous hurt, and sentenced him to nine years' imprisonment with 12 strokes of the cane. Currently, the prosecution is appealing against Salihin's murder acquittal and sentence.
Background
Nursabrina Agustiani Abdullah, also addressed as Sabrina, was born in Singapore in 2014, and her mother Syabilla Syamien Riyadi, who was 17 when she gave birth to Sabrina, was an Indonesian-born Singapore permanent resident born in 1996. The identity of Sabrina's biological father, who was Syabilla's former partner, was unknown.
When Sabrina was two years old, her mother married a Singaporean citizen named Muhammad Salihin bin Ismail (born in 1993) on 31 August 2016, and they had a pair of twin sons on 29 November 2016, and lived together at a rented flat in Bukit Batok. From 2006 to 2016, Salihin had been sentenced to probation, reformative training and military detention (during his National Service) for various offences, ranging from theft, robbery to drug consumption. For his then latest offence before the death of Sabrina, Salihin was released from the Singapore Armed Forces detention barracks in February 2017.
According to Salihin's sisters, father and stepmother, Salihin was a quiet man and never lost his temper, and had a normal relationship with his wife, and treated Sabrina as his own daughter, and he treated her and the twins equally. Even so, Salihin's sisters confirmed that he once nearly punched their youngest brother over a minor dispute, and court documents showed that Salihin had inflicted physical violence on Sabrina on two occasions; one in July 2017 when he scalded her for five seconds using hot water while showering her, and another between January and April 2018 when Salihin had slammed Sabrina's head on the floor. According to the defence, regarding the incident with the shower, Salihin was allegedly angry at Sabrina for not wanting to shower with cold water due to his need to save electricity costs and he thus turned on the maximum temperature to scald the girl in a fit of anger. In relation to the second incident, Salihin was trying to feed Sabrina, who instead hid under her bed, which purportedly upset him and therefore provoking him into hitting Sabrina's head.
Sabrina's death
When Sabrina turned four in 2018, her parents planned to send her to kindergarten in late September 2018, and therefore tried to toilet-train her to prepare for pre-school, but Sabrina still urinated outside the toilet despite the efforts to educate her otherwise.