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Woman, daughter believed to have fallen 16 floors

A Bangladeshi woman and her daughter were buried Saturday at the Choa Chu Kang Muslim Cemetery after they were found dead at the foot of a block of HDB flats in Jurong West the day before.

45-year-old Rabeya Khatun and her four-year-old daughter were believed to have fallen 16 floors from Block 695B, Jurong West Street 65, the building beside the block they lived in, reported The Sunday Times (ST).

The same paper reported that Khatun was found on Friday afternoon wearing a pale-coloured long tunic and trousers, while her daughter was dressed in a red top. The two were pronounced dead by paramedics at 3:01pm, after police received a call about them at 2:45pm.

On the 16th floor of the block, where the two were believed to have fallen from, an abandoned chair was found next to the parapet with a plastic bag containing sheets of paper and documents hanging from it, reported the broadsheet.

A note was also attached to the outside of the bag, which read in broken English, "Please this on give policeman. There have some paper." The newspaper reported that no suicide notes were found in the bag, however.

Khatun's husband, Jurong shipyard electrical engineer Abdul Quddus, who is a permanent resident in his 40s, was said to be devastated by the loss of his wife and only child, crying at their burial service, which was attended by about 150 people, ST reported .

One of Quddus's neighbours told ST that Quddus had been living at the flat in Jurong West for more than five years, and it was only in early 2010 that his wife and daughter started living there with him. His father also joined them later on.

The paper reported that Khatun and Quddus's father quarrelled quite loudly in the middle of last year, and police intervened.

An HDB estate cleaner, Abdul Rahman, who is also from Bangladesh and has been working in the estate for the last two years, told The New Paper, which first reported the story on Friday, that he was returning from his Friday prayers when he came across the bodies.

The 24-year-old said he knew both victims, and that he often saw the woman and her husband walk the little girl to a nearby kindergarten.

"They appeared to be a happy family," he said.

Meanwhile a Madam Tan Jak Hoon, who lived on the 16th floor of the same block, said the victims could have used the broken chair that was stored outside her flat to climb over the parapet before their fall.

She said that the chair, which had been left outside her five-room flat for the past two years, had been moved from its original location and that a "visible footprint" of an adult could be seen on it.