Surrender, please: Policemen standing outside the locked room trying to persuade the man to surrender and release his mother at their home in Menggatal.
KOTA KINABALU: Two policemen were slashed by a mental patient with a meat cleaver after they stormed into a house to free the man’s mother whom he was holding hostage in their home in Menggatal near here.
A police team was earlier deployed to the house at Taman Jaya Diri after being alerted of a mentally unstable person who had run amok with a weapon and locked himself up with his mother and elder sister in a bedroom at 2.30pm on Monday.
He had also roughed up the sister, it was learned.
Kota Kinabalu police chief Asst Comm Mohd Zaidi Abdullah said police tried to gently persuade the 42-year-old man from outside the locked room to surrender himself and let go his two hostages.
The man, however, refused to do so and only released his sister, he added.
Police then spent almost two hours, he said, to coax the suspect out, but the man was not having any of it.
When there were no signs of the suspect cooperating, police broke down the door and stormed inside to rescue the mother, he said.
“But the suspect retaliated aggressively and a struggle ensued between him and the police,” ACP Mohd Zaidi said yesterday.
“The suspect managed to slash one of our senior officers and a sergeant.
“They sustained injuries to the arm, head and shoulders while the suspect only sustained light facial injuries; the mother was unhurt,” he added.
The policemen were reported to be fine.
ACP Mohd Zaidi said the suspect was a patient at the Bukit Padang psychiatric hospital here.
He said the case was being investigated under Section 307 of the Penal Code for attempted murder where the man faces a maximum 20 years in jail if found guilty.
