Teacher forces boy to smoke 40 cigarettes

KUAH, Malaysia, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- A Malaysian teacher made a 16-year-old student smoke 40 cigarettes in two hours after finding him with a cigarette and lighter in his locker, officials said.

A school official said the school later apologized to the boy's uncle, who had lodged a police report when he found out about the punishment.

The unidentified school official assured reporters the punishment -- carried out before an audience of students and teachers -- "did not happen often," The Times of London reported.

The English teacher who found the cigarette and lighter was especially furious, the official said, because student Mohamad Alif Arifin had been a model of good behavior and hard work until then.

School administrators on the island of Langkawi, some 19 miles off the mainland coast of northwestern Malaysia, could not be immediately reached.

The government lets schools whip boys with a salted rattan cane for smoking, vandalism and other offenses.

In 2007, a national outcry followed revelations that 200 schoolgirls were led outside from their boarding school dormitory into the pouring rain and forced to crouch in a pond for an hour as punishment for clogging toilets.

The punishment was carried out because no student owned up to causing the toilet problem.