MY COMMENT: I am shocked and embittered by the decision of our Appeals Court
to set free convicted murderers of a Mongolian national. It is not
disbelief, John, it is certainly an outrage and it is very much a
national disgrace. It’s time for the Mongolian Government to stand up
for the rights of the murdered Altantuya and her family to justice. If
these characters did not kill her, who executed this dastardly act and
on whose orders was the C4 explosives used? God certainly knows and we
minions who dream of peace, freedom and justice also know what had
happened. I can imagine the consequences if the victim of this brutal
murder was a US citizen. The US government would pursue to the matter to
the ends of the earth. It is a Day of Infamy for Malaysian Justice.–Din Merican
to set free convicted murderers of a Mongolian national. It is not
disbelief, John, it is certainly an outrage and it is very much a
national disgrace. It’s time for the Mongolian Government to stand up
for the rights of the murdered Altantuya and her family to justice. If
these characters did not kill her, who executed this dastardly act and
on whose orders was the C4 explosives used? God certainly knows and we
minions who dream of peace, freedom and justice also know what had
happened. I can imagine the consequences if the victim of this brutal
murder was a US citizen. The US government would pursue to the matter to
the ends of the earth. It is a Day of Infamy for Malaysian Justice.–Din MericanA Day of Infamy for our Judiciary: Freeing Altantuya Murderers
Written by John BerthelsenFriday, 23 August 2013
The tragedy of a brutal killing compounded by courtroom farce
Malaysia’s Court of Appeal on Friday
overturned an earlier conviction of two of Prime Minister Najib Tun
Razak’s former bodyguards on a charge of murdering Mongolian translator
Altantuya Shaariibuu in October 2006 in a ruling that was greeted with
disbelief and outrage.
The court said the two former elite police offers would go free because Najib’s chief of staff, Musa Safri (left),
was never called to testify in a trial that was widely regarded as a
cooked-up sham designed to protect Najib, then Defense Minister, from
being interrogated or having to testify.The prosecution can appeal the
acquittal to the Federal Court, the nation’s highest tribunal. The two
were scheduled to be freed on Friday. The judgment caused predictable
anger and derision in Kuala Lumpur, with hundreds of Twitter responses
condemning the verdict as a farce.
Cynthia Gabriel, Director of the human
rights NGO Suaram, issued a statement that the “shocking verdict throws
open the murder of Altantuya in 2006 and questions now abound as to who
killed her. It also throws open the question on how she was killed. How
were the C4 explosives (used to blow up her body) obtained? It’s not
like C4 can be obtained at 7-Eleven stores,” she said.
The tangled case has transfixed Malaysian
high society for nearly seven years, in major part because of the
extraordinary efforts by the government and prosecutors to insulate
Najib and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, and others from the case. Those
efforts included promising a now-dead private detective RM5 million
to shut up and get out of the country after he had implicated Najib in
the case.Altantuya was murdered execution-style on Oct.19, 2006, leaving
behind a note confessing that she was attempting to blackmail Abdul Razak Baginda,
a security analyst and close friend of then Defense Minister Najib, for
US$500,000. Although no reason was given for the blackmail attempt, it
was thought to have been in connection with the US$1 billion purchase of
submarines from a French-owned defense contractor in which Razak
Baginda’s wholly owned company, Perimekar Sdn Bhd, received a €114
million commission that was characterized in a French investigation as a bribe to be steered to the United Malays National Organization.
Razak Baginda was initially charged along
with the two bodyguards but in a highly unusual proceeding was freed
without having to put on a defense despite having delivered a sworn
statement that he had asked Najib’s office to do something about
Altantuya, his jilted girlfriend, who was harassing him. He immediately
decamped for the UK and hasn’t been seen since in Malaysia.The original
court case against the two bodyguards was replete with numerous
irregularities including the last-minute replacement of the trial judge
and prosecution team before the trial began and what appeared to be
clear attempts to keep evidence from being introduced in court,
including an assertion by Altantuya‘s cousin that she had seen pictures
of Altantuya with Najib and Razak Baginda at dinner together.
The woman also testified that all records
of her entry to the country with Altantuya had disappeared from the
immigration department. Her allegations were never followed up.The
decision by the three-member appeal court came despite the fact that
Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar, one of the two, confessed to the murder in a sworn statement that inexplicably was never introduced in court.
Sirul had even been read his rights prior to the confession. He was
also not questioned by prosecutors in court about the events he
described in the excluded confession.
In that document, Sirul said he and Chief
Inspector Azilah Hadri of the Special Action Unit, the other freed
Friday, had been promised RM100,000 to kill the woman and two of her
Mongolian companions. The Special Action United was under then-Defense
Minister Najib. When they tried to seek out the women in their hotel,
Sirul said, CCTV cameras made it impractical to kill them there.
Eventually, according to reports, they picked up Altantuya in front of
Razak Baginda’s house and took her to the clearing where she was killed
There was no attempt at trial to determine who offered to pay for the
murder.
From the time Azilah and Sirul were put
on trial, the case had obvious political overtones because of
speculation about who may have ordered the killing and also because she
was pregnant at the time, perhaps with a high-ranking official’s baby.
After she was shot twice in the head in a jungled area near the city of
Shah Alam, her body was blown up with plastic explosives, contributing
to the theory that the murderers were attempting to destroy the fetus’s
DNA.
The decision to hear the appeal was
delayed for more than two years, raising suspicions that the delay was
ordered to keep the case from affecting the May 5, 2013 general
election, in which Najib and the Barisan Nasional coalition managed to
preserve a parliamentary majority despite losing the popular vote to the
opposition Pakatan Rakyat led by Anwar Ibrahim.
Senior lawyer Karpal Singh, national
chairman of the Opposition Democratic Action Party, who held a watching
brief for Altantuya’s family during the original trial, said he would
reactivate a suspended RM100 million civil suit over the woman’s death
and would try to call Najib and Musa Safri to the witness
stand.Altantuya’s father, Setev Shaariibuu, an Ulan Batur psychologist,
was contacted by News portal MalaysiaKini through a Mongolian
lawyer but he refused to give a statement. He was quoted saying, “It is
time the government of Mongolia make a statement about this.”
Although Altantuya had once been Razak
Baginda’s girlfriend, the late private detective, Perumal
Balasumbraniam, said he had been told by Razak Baginda that she had been
Najib’s girlfriend first but that he passed her on to Razak Baginda
because Najib didn’t want to be entangled in an affair when he was
seeking the premiership.
Razak Baginda’s wife Mazalinda, on the
first day of the trial in a Kuala Lumpur courtroom, screamed out that
Razak Baginda “didn’t want to be prime minister,” which was taken as an
acknowledgment of the prior relationship.”Najib has repeatedly claimed
to have sworn on the Koran that he never met the woman, although a trail
of evidence shows that Najib, Razak Baginda and Altantuya were in
Europe at the same time in 2005 when Najib, as Defense Minister, was
finalizing the training of Malaysian naval personnel to operate the
country’s scandal-plagued Scorpene submarines, bought from a subsidiary
of the French defense giant DCN.
The judgment, read this morning by
Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, ruled there was serious misdirection by
the High Court judge on the original trial, including not calling
Najib’s former aide de camp Musa Safri and the failure to take into
consideration the police station’s diary which stated that Azilah was at
the Bukit Aman main police headquarters at the time Altantuya was
killed.In reading the judgment, Justice Tengku Maimun said the court did
not find anywhere in the High Court’s judgment that the alibi had been
considered and that there were inconsistencies in the telephone call
logs of the accused.
“These include the police station’s diary
which states that Azilah was at Bukit Aman and not at the crime
scene.”"It is our judgment the cumulative effect of the non-directions
by the judged rendered the conviction unsafe. We unanimously allow both
appeals. Conviction and sentence are set aside. The appellants are
acquitted and discharged,” concluded Tengku Maimun.
(With reporting by Malaysiakini)
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