Woman jailed for selling fake MCs to drug addicts

SINGAPORE — A housewife was sentenced to five months’ jail on Friday (March 24) for providing drug addicts with forged medical certificates (MCs) to cover their absence from urine tests.

Nursusilla Kassim, 26, faced four charges of providing or selling forged MCs from Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH), Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) and National University Hospital (NUH) to two men between Jan 10 and 29 last year. She sold the documents for S$20 each.

Court documents stated that a middleman named Shaik Abood Abdullah introduced the two men to her.

One of the men, Mohammad Rashid Hatnan, was supposed to report to a supervision officer at a police station twice a week for urine tests. When he missed an appointment on Jan 4 last year, he approached Abood to get a fake MC.

Abood linked him up with Nursusilla, who asked if he wanted a forged MC from KTPH, TTSH, NUH or Singapore General Hospital. Rashid said that he had no preference and they met up to complete the transaction.

After Rashid handed in the forged MC to his supervision officer, his deed was exposed when the officer noticed incorrect information on the MC and ran checks with KTPH. Between Jan 16 and 29, Nursusilla also handed three forged MCs to another man, Sahlan Moati, who missed three urine tests at another police station.

Pleading leniency in a letter to the court on Friday, Nursusilla said that she accepted full responsibility for her actions.

District Judge Lim Keng Yeow said that the accused committed forgery in a “deliberate and calculated” manner, getting the right templates and fashioning the documents to be deceptive.

“The fact that she may not have known exactly how the MC would be used did not reduce her culpability. It was obvious that they would be used for deceit and could be used to facilitate many forms of unlawful conduct,” the judge said.

Her co-accused Abood has been in remand since Oct 11 last year. Rashid was jailed six months for using a forged document and failing to report for a urine test, while Sahlan remains at large with an arrest warrant issued against him. VALERIE KOH