By Zaihan Mohamed Yusof and Charlene Chua

FOR more than 12 hours, a woman in Singapore wondered anxiously what had happened to her husband.

Her frantic calls to Mr Jeffrey James Luhur, a Singapore permanent resident in his late 30s, went unanswered.

And he didn't return his wife's calls, though several hours had passed since he was due home from a road trip to Malaysia.

The Indonesian businessman had left for Kuala Lumpur on Thursday morning to attend a business meeting.

Mrs Luhur's worst fears were realised when she learnt the painful truth around3am yesterday.

Her husband's body had been lying in a mortuary at Tampin Hospital in Negri Sembilan.

He was killed in a traffic accident on the North-South Highway around 9am on Thursday.

A family friend, Ms Sereen Koh, told The New Paper yesterday: "Mrs Luhur got very worried when her husband was uncontactable by 5pm (on Thursday). He was supposed to return home that evening."

Mrs Luhur, a Taiwanese with Singapore permanent residency, became even more worried when her husband's business contact in KL told her that he never showed up for their meeting.

The contact then made some checks and managed to trace Mr Luhur's last known location and drove there in search of him.

He saw Mr Luhur's damaged car at an embankment near the 226.9km marker on the North-South Highway.

Ms Koh said: "He found the wreckage of the black Honda car, but there was no body to be found."