2-7-2024 (KUALA LUMPUR) A 20-year-old woman in Malaysia found herself trapped inside the luggage compartment of a coach after attempting to retrieve her belongings. The terrifying ordeal, which unfolded on June 25th aboard a bus operated by a Malaysian transport company, has sparked outrage and calls for immediate action from the authorities.
The passenger, known only by her social media handle “Little Fairy,” had been traveling alone from Kuala Lumpur to Johor Bahru when the incident occurred. Upon arriving at her destination around 5:50 pm, she disembarked to retrieve her suitcase from the bus’s luggage compartment. However, as she reached inside to pull out her belongings, which had been pushed “very far inside,” the compartment door unexpectedly closed, trapping her within the confined space.
In a heart-wrenching account shared on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, “Little Fairy” described the sheer terror she experienced in those moments. “I turned around and hit the compartment door with my hands. But nobody could hear me,” she wrote in Mandarin. “You can’t understand how I felt at the time…I hope nobody else will have to go through such a frightening experience.”
Desperate for help, the trapped passenger attempted to contact the bus operator using the number she had received in a booking confirmation earlier that morning. “I said, I’m locked in the luggage compartment, could you call the driver for me?” she recalled. However, her pleas for assistance were met with indifference, as the person on the other end of the line appeared not to comprehend the gravity of the situation and abruptly hung up.
As the minutes ticked by, “Little Fairy” grew increasingly panicked, feeling breathless and dizzy in the confined space. Fearing that she might faint and never wake up, she made another frantic call to the bus operator. This time, a woman answered, but instead of offering assistance, she responded with hostility, demanding to know why the passenger was inside the compartment.
It wasn’t until 6:06 pm, over 10 minutes after her initial cry for help, that the bus finally pulled over, and “Little Fairy” was able to emerge from her nightmarish ordeal. To her dismay, the bus driver allegedly greeted her with a smile, explaining that he thought she had already disembarked, without offering an apology for the harrowing experience she had endured.
When her boyfriend later contacted the bus operator, the company issued an apology and promised to take steps to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future. The driver, they claimed, had failed to notice the passenger retrieving her luggage due to heavy rain.
“We immediately took necessary action on the mentioned driver and staff for not informing us of this issue beforehand,” a customer service officer stated. “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and distress your girlfriend experienced.”
