Family of 12-year-old Sharjah schoolgirl look for answers after death plunge

The grief-stricken family of a 12-year-old girl are desperately trying to find out how she fell to her death from the 8th floor of a building in Sharjah.

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SHARJAH // The grief-stricken family of a 12-year-old girl are desperately trying to find out how she fell to her death from the 8th floor of a building in Sharjah.

Gurudev Singh, who runs a transport company in Ajman, said his wife was inconsolable over their daughter Harjapjot Bajwa’s death.

“She is shaken and keeps thinking of what happened,” he said. “We are now waiting for the police to hand over her body. We are very sad that she is no more.”

Harjapjot took a taxi after the Sharjah Indian School bus dropped her outside her Ajman home. Her parents believe she first went to a friend’s house to ask for money to pay the taxi.

“She came home then sat in a taxi and went to her classmate’s house,” Mr Singh said. “When she asked her and her mother for Dh25 to pay the taxi, they did not give it to her and instead asked her to go back home.”

After leaving the friend’s house, Harjapjot went to a shopping mall in Sharjah, where she was last seen. She asked the taxi driver if she could pay with her earrings.

“The driver refused to accept it,” said Harman, the girl’s brother.

“She then gave him our mother’s number and ran away,” Harman said. “He tried calling my mother around 4pm. My mother rarely uses this phone and answered his call only around 4.30, when he told us what had happened.”

Mr Singh said it was a normal school day and the family were not sure why their daughter took a taxi back to Sharjah.

“She was perfectly fine when she left home for school. We do not know how this happened. We would like the CCTV footage from the shop she went to, to understand what she did there,” he said.

“We also want to see the building from where she fell.”

Police said on Monday they were trying to determine what happened between Harjapjot leaving the taxi and the discovery of her body at the building in Al Qasimiyah.

The girl’s school told some of its bus drivers to turn back and look for Harjapjot immediately after the parents alerted them that she was missing.

The bus dropped the girl outside her home at 2.30pm on Sunday and drivers started looking for her at about 4pm, when the parents called.

On Tuesday the school notified pupils of Harjapjot’s death.

The school principal recalled her as an easy-going and above-average pupil. “She was a jovial character,” said Radhakrishnan Nair, who visited the family on Tuesday.

“The family has no idea what has happened. I sat with them for one-and-a-half hours.

“She was very fond of her dad and was thick friends with her brother.”

“The school principal informed us this morning of her tragic death,” said one pupil. “He announced it on the school speaker and we all held a minute’s silence in her memory.”

“It is shocking that such a young girl has died,” said another student.

pkannan@thenational.ae