By Sofia Nasir
SHAH ALAM, June 16 — More than 10 bodies, including that of an infant, have been discovered in Sungai Klang since works to remove waste there started in 2022.
The clean-up project, carried out under the Selangor Maritime Gateway (SMG) initiative, has uncovered varied items in the process of clearing the 94,000 metric tonnes of waste from the river.
“All kinds of items have been picked up — refrigerators, motorbikes, sofas, mattresses, and also human bodies,” said the managing director of Landasan Lumayan Sdn Bhd (LLSB), the company tasked with the project.
“Almost every month a body is discovered. We hand them over to the police,” Syaiful Azmen Nordin said, during a meet-up with the press yesterday.
[caption id="attachment_404363" align="alignnone" width="1024"]
Syaiful Azmen Nordin, managing director of Landasan Lumayan Sdn Bhd, speaks to the press after guiding them on a tour of the clean-up works at Sungai Klang, on June 16, 2025. — Picture by REMY ARIFIN/MEDIA SELANGOR[/caption]
Syaiful had earlier brought a group of journalists to visit the flood mitigation project site that covers 15 kilometres of Sungai Klang.
He said the huge amount of waste on the riverbed of Sungai Klang often causes the machinery used for dredging to stall. The drill bits of the dredgers need constant replacements due to this, further escalating costs.
Syaiful is asking for the public to be more discerning when discarding their large items, and to be more civic minded in order to preserve the cleanliness of our rivers.
“This project only enables us to treat the symptoms, and not the causes, of river pollution. How long more must we do this? The most important way forward is to change people’s mentality,” he said.
Sungai Klang’s rehabilitation project also includes works to deepen and widen the river, strengthen its banks, and clean its water.
This has increased the river’s capacity by 40 per cent and reduced the occurrence of flooding.
The entire project comes at a budget of RM700 million, involving 56 kilometres of land stretching from Mid Valley in Kuala Lumpur and all the way to Port Klang.
