Only one thing is clear in this dust storm of fierce argument. We are not interested in truth. A complex reality has been distilled into campaign fodder in election season. Politics is the petrol that can turn such a fire into conflagration.
Welcome to the wild wild west where the law enforcers no longer inspire fear in the hearts of the criminals. For a country with a very restrictive firearms policy, there seems to be a surprising number of guns (legal and illegal) in circulation.
The Iranian man must have links with the underworld because this is the same reason given our greatest and smartest Home Minister when Sri Sanjeevan was shot. Anyway our crime rate is still low compared with Mexico, Colombia and Somalia. This latest shooting is just a figment of the Home Minister, PDRM and Pemandu’s imagination.
Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli, said Sanjeevan had told him that he was in possession of an internal memo with the “sulit” stamped on it, but he had not seen the list himself.”Sanjeevan insisted there were a number of people on the list and that the offences were serious. These policemen were being probed for their alleged links to drug syndicates,” Rafizi said.
He said it was important not to preclude anything for now, and the probe by police must not just stop at this link, as the links with the underworld could also involve other parts of the home ministry.
“If Sanjeevan was to disclose the internal memo, it could provide a different perspective altogether on this issue of crime, particularly the relationship between underworld, police and possibly the home ministry,” said Rafizi.
Another PKR politician, R. Sivarasa, meanwhile said that looking at the manner of the shooting, it was clear that it was carried out by hired killers.
Sivarasa said Zahid and the IGP must appreciate the fact that former IGP Tan Sri Musa Hassan had come out clearly to say there is a connection between Sanjeevan’s shooting and his expose of policemen being linked to the underworld.
To date, only Sanjeevan’s friend who was with him during the shooting has been detained. That too, police had said, was related to a drug offence and not to the attack on Sanjeevan.
Opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim took Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to task for quickly dismissing police involvement in the shooting of anti-crime watchdog chief R. Sri Sanjeevan
Judging by the comments made by the minister, it appears that what he lacks in intelligence , he makes up in stupidity.
thought they charged Alvivi in court and immediately investigate them because someone was tied up and beaten because of a so-called isolated hate crime. Even so, the victim has denied that it was because of hate crime.
Our HM denies it has anything to do with the police even before investigation and even Sanjeevan was shot and in critical condition despite the police reports being lodge over the death threats he received and possible connection to rogue policemen. The fact is the victim is in critical condition, shot in a murder attempt, and has even lodge police reports of possible connection to the police, yet HM easily brushes off any connection to the police before investigations.
Also, has crime rate gone down as claimed by PEMANDU?
- BARELY 48 hours after MyWatch chairman R. Sri Sanjeevan was shot, the nation was caught off guard by another shooting incident, this time the victim is Hussain Ahmad Najadi, a renowned banker and founder of the Arab Malaysian Banking Group.
This makes it at least 14 cases since April this year and the victims varied from teachers, to criminals, to Customs Department’s deputy director-general.
As this article was being written, it was reported that a man was shot in his right thigh while driving with a friend in Bukit Mertajam at 8.30pm. Police said the victim, who had a number of criminal records, was rushed to the Kulim Hospital for treatment while his friend was unhurt.
Sanjeevan’s fate, in the meantime, hangs by a thread with his father R. Ramakrishnan saying that his condition has worsened due to internal bleeding. Doctors said the shooting had affected his heart and lungs.
The frequency and brutality of these crimes makes us wonder whether the declining crime statictics in the country are accurate and authentic or merely sugar-coated numbers meant to silence inquiring public and critics.
It was reported that from 2009 to 2012, the national crime rate dropped by 27 per cent while street crime fell by 39.7 per cent.
They added that the crime rate also fell six per cent for the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year.
With rampant cases of shooting around the country for the past few months, the authority should realised that the issue is no longer about perception but a genuine concern among Malaysians.
Crime analyst Kamal Afendi Hashim said criminals these days are becoming more brazen and brutal. The long arm of the law meant nothing to them.
He said shooting cases like these are not only shocking but also spreads fear among the public.
“People are hearing a lot of these cases of late. Usually the victims are fellow criminals but recently victims have become more varied and involved people of influence such as businessman, politicians and government official.
“The motive are also differs and may be revenge-related or rivalry between two parties,” he said.
On the latest shooting cases, Kamal said there are many factors that can make a person becoming a target of assassination including the victim’s background, association with bad hats or the wrong crowd, jealousy, business rivalry, miscommunication and others.
“For example, if the victim who have ties with the underworld and wants out, surely the organisation will not be happy. Fearing possible exposure of their secrets, the organisation retaliated by paying hired guns to take carre of the ‘loose ends’.
“In Sanjeevan’s case, it could be related to his tweet prior to the shooting,” he said.
However, Kamal said if such allegations were found to be untrue, the accuser should also be prepared to face the music and take responsibility for his or her action.
He urged police to conduct a thorough investigations into these shooting cases and covered all the angles.
Kamal said another factor was the easily obtainable firearms.
“With experience and connections, there criminals can, one way or another, find their way to a pistol. Due to its small size and weight, smuggling firearms into the country should not be too hard,
“With the current technological know-how and the magic of Internet, criminals can also make their own firearms.
“If the fireams is home-made, police will surely have a hard time identifying it.” he said.
In Sanjeevan’s case, Kamal believed the shooter could be an amateur because he failed to kill his target.
At the same time, the government should engaged international or reputable local accounting company to produce an independent report on the crime statistics to tackle this poor perception among the public and regain their confidence.
Notable cases this year
July 28
A man was shot dead and his two friends seriously injured when two gunmen opened fire from inside a car in front of a restaurant in Kampung Simee, Ipoh. In the 10.15pm incident, Jasrafveenderjeet Singh, 25, died while undergoing treatment at Raja Permaisuri Bainun Hospital.
July 18
A secondary school teacher K. Shanmugan of Taman Biadara, Kulim, was shot nine times at point blank range by unidentified gunmen on motorcycle when he stopped his car at a red light near Simpang Empat Keladi while on his way to school.
July 12
A four-year-old boy was injured in the forehead and left leg when a gunman opened fire at him and his car repossessor father in front of their home in Bkt Jambul, Penang.
July 8
Student affairs senior assistant Hashim Mat Zain, 43, was gunned down in a gangland style killing outside the school at a junction in Tawang, near Bachok, Kelantan at 1.45pm.
July 5
Teacher Mat Zaki Hashim, 35, sustained serious injuries after being shot in the neck in Kg Kubang Panjang, Pasir Mas. His car was believed to have stalled on the road before he was shot by unknown assailants.
June 15
Royal Malaysian Customs Dept deputy director-general Datuk Shaharuddin Ibrahim, 58, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle at a traffic light junction in Putrajaya.
May 29
A businessman survives despite being shot at seven times by two men on a motorcycle in Bandar Rahman Putra, Sungai Buloh.
May 25
A fish wholesaler, Zahari A. Razak, was shot dead while driving his car out from a mosque in Cherang Ruku, Pasir Puteh after performing the Isyak prayer.
May 13
Two people were killed and two others injured when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire with an automatic pistol as they were leaving a wedding reception in Butterworth, Penang.
May 12
An assistant at a second-hand shop is shot dead at a traffic light junction near Kulim, Kedah.
April 30
A pillion rider fired at a man in the compound of his home in Simpang, Taiping but missed. The men had rode up to the house of the 26-year-old victim and called out his name before firing the shot.
April 25
N. Ragunathan, 39, was shot dead in his car after he had conducted a transaction at the Road Transport Department office along Jalan Seremban-Taiping. He was alone in his Proton Perdana when two men rode up alongside his car outside the RTD office.
Home Minister utterly absurd and ridiculous – to dismiss wrong-doing by parties even before proper investigation and proper findings. Not fit to be a Home Minister, whenever an UMNO politician/govt official is under investigation, the public is advised not to comment on it/arrive at a quick conclusion. Police is right that they should have be left to do their work. But now, home minister himself is setting a bad example by saying its not related to the police. Why such haste to announce this? Is the home minister the lead investigator? Has he completed the investigation ahead of the Bukit Aman team? Does he know more than d investigating officer? Regardless of whatever d investigation will reveal, if leadership is by example, zahid hamidi has failed. Why such hurry to announce this? This is just like d lahad datu incursion where “some” people said its led by old men
There is more to this case than the minister telling us. Why is he in a desperate rush to rule out PDRM >? Very disturbing statement. We may not be told the full truth. This is why an independent investigation need to take place and findings reported back to a cross party committee.! This minister is not fit for purpose Usually the IGP will advise the public not ho come up with any wild assumptions. This time will he tell his boss to shut up & wait for the results of proper police investigation?
My one encounter, if that is the appropriate word, with a policeman who had washed his hands in cold blood, was in an empty Amritsar hotel at the height of the Punjab insurrection in the late 1980s. It is difficult to imagine now what Punjab was like then. The Golden Temple, wrecked by Operation Bluestar, had become a symbol of the broken Sikh heart. Terrorism, inspired by the dream of secession, acquired a raging justification . Amritsar was sullen by day and silent by night; fear haunted Punjab like a living ghost.
The IPS officer had come for a chat in the evening; only police vehicles moved after sunset. There was a look of almost unnatural calm on his face, and it was only in the middle of a largely onesided conversation that it occurred to me that this was the visage of narcotic serenity. Perhaps his nerves needed solace, or possibly his conscience. But when he spoke he did not quiver. He was on the front lines of a vicious war launched by elements who wanted to partition India again. It was his duty to destroy them first, he said with a thin smile that started on his lips but petered out midway. It would be gratuitous to mention his faith, but those locked in conventional wisdom would be surprised.
Much before Punjab this argument was heard in the North East; then repeated in Kashmir. As terrorism spread its footprint across India through the 1990s and first decade of the new century, reaching a horrific, televised climax in Mumbai when gunmen, armed and trained in Pakistani sanctuaries , a dilemma has ebbed and flowed through the tides of Indian public opinion. Can outlaws be contained through the binding laws of a liberal democracy ? Should right to life, a fundamental tenet of our Constitution, be extended to those who kill innocents , arbitrarily, bomb buildings, hijack aircraft, or target places of worship in order to inject poison into the demographic veins of India? Theory has the good fortune of living in a black-and-white textbook . Reality is grey. Terrorists thrive in shadow wars, protected by a paradox: since they are out of uniform, they can always claim innocence until the moment they pull a trigger. We forget the number of alibis that were floated even after something as self-evident as the 2008 Mumbai attack and some were repeated in Parliament by a Cabinet minister in the UPA government. Our security forces have to hunt in such treacherous fog. Their job is to succeed before the trigger is squeezed, to find Indira Gandhi’s and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins before they have succeeded, and to stop a thousand attacks on civilians during a festival or any other day. The Army has the umbrella of a special act to limit accountability in case of a mistake. The spirit of democracy argues against such privilege, but the visceral need for security against covert evil pulls in the other direction. The trouble with sanction for murder is that it brutalizes and breeds rogues, particularly in our police, where any moral code has been weakened by corruption and arrogance. Police have jailed and killed innocents, coerced money out of helpless victims, confident that politicians, themselves largely corrupt, will never find the courage to confront them. The worry is that public opinion often condones “Dirty Harry” methods, in which a bullet takes precedence over due process. When, in 1993, it became clear that criminals owing allegiance to Dawood Ibrahim were involved in the horrific Mumbai blasts, the city’s police were offered freedom of the trigger. Citizens approved, as did the Congress, Shiv Sena, BJP and voters. Films glorified ‘encounter specialists’ . The syndrome is no longer as gory, but Chulbul Pandey still shoots first and whistles later. In 2008 Delhi police killed young men at Batla House. This year, on May 18, a young man in custody, Khalid Mujahid, died in “mysterious circumstances” while being taken to Barabanki jail by the UP police; 42 of them, including senior officers , are under investigation. For years in Hyderabad and Malegaon, “suspects” have been jailed for years without proof of complicity in any terrorist act. Congress or Samajwadi Party were in power in these states. And of course BJP ruled Gujarat when 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan was killed by the police. There is no standard response. Let alone outrage, there is hardly any rage about Delhi, UP, Andhra or Maharashtra. Most people have probably chosen their sides over Ishrat Jahan. The CBI’s chargesheet is enough for those who believe she is guiltless. Others stress the IB version that David Headley, convicted of terrorism, mentioned her name; or wonder what she was doing in the company of three men recognized, even by the CBI, as terrorists.
Only one thing is clear in this dust storm of fierce argument. We are not interested in truth. A complex reality has been distilled into campaign fodder in election season. Politics is the petrol that can turn such a fire into conflagration.
If, in 2002, a traffic cop in the fairy-tale town of Swat had booked a car speeding through its bazaar, NATO troops could have left Pakistan by 2003, Iraq might have escaped NATO’s invasion, Barack Obama would probably be an unknown Senator from Chicago and George Bush Junior’s presidential library in Texas would certainly have something to cheer about. But, according to Maryam, her husband Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti “quickly settled the matter”, and the bribed Swat cop never realized he had just let Osama bin Laden escape. Maryam was giving evidence before the Justice Javed Iqbal commission, set up to enquire into the events of 2 May 2011, when US Navy Seals flew three hours into Pak territory, found and killed Osama. Nothing works on our great subcontinent better than instant cash. Al-Kuwati, Osama’s most trust aide, knew that. This is the kind of authentic detail which makes a fabulous story so entirely believable.
Which bit of this enquiry report, spread over 336 pages, garnered from 201 witnesses, is beyond doubt, which is useful, and how many witnesses have spun out little gossamer tales hide truth in a silken web?
Trivia, as indicated, deserves its place in the footnotes of history. Osama, according to a wife, wore a cowboy hat to protect himself from aerial surveillance. Well: where do you buy a 10-gallon Texan hat in Abbottabad? Can’t bring it in the luggage from a Bora Bora battlefield, either. Perhaps she confused it with a baseball cap. We also learn that Osama sometimes shaved his signature beard as part of a disguise. True, this would be perfect deception, but how long would it take to get that beard back to its original majestic length? Presumably no one in that band of brothers and wives had the courage to click a mobile picture of Osama in transition, not even a young consort in a playful mood.
In 2005, after pit stops in five Pakistan cities, the Osama entourage settled into this military garrison town, in a house so visible that no one could see it. The property was bought with a fake ID; perhaps the traffic cop principle was operational again. Four electricity and gas meters were installed in that house; no one asked why. This might have a proper explanation. No one checks electricity meters in Pakistan, so why make an exception in Abbottabad?
The high wall surrounding the house collapsed in the 2005 earthquake, and rubble lay around for months, but no one bothered to enquire, or even see, who lived inside. If you want to raise one eyebrow, reserve your second for the next story. An official survey area listed this home as “be-chiragh” or uninhabited. The Iqbal commission knows the answer: it acknowledges something “more sinister”. In 2005, Pak intelligence “closed the book” on Osama bin Laden; there was “grave complicity (at an) undetermined level”.
That level was obviously former dictator Pervez Musharraf, for this is how decisions are made during army rule. There was no incompetence. There was complicity. Take just one fact: CIA gave ISI certain phone numbers to monitor; it did not. At each turn, Islamabad manufactured and sold a lie to the world. In the beginning came Musharraf’s repeated denials, often accompanied by the hearty laugh reminiscent of retired colonels in the old British army. At the end, when Washington declared Osama dead, a chorus of spokespeople was paraded before media, not least Indian television, to nudge-wink the suggestion that Osama’s capture was a joint US-Pak operation. America had long stopped trusting Pakistan on Osama. Justice Iqbal and his brave colleagues refused to seal a lie with interpretative approval, and deserve our unstinted praise. The episode, they say, indicates not just incompetence or irresponsibility, but something “worse”.
The commission touched one significant nerve when it analyzed the complete failure of Pakistan’s military defences on its western frontier, breached totally by America on that historic night of May 2. The Pakistan air force apparently learnt about Operation Neptune Spear only when it saw media reports. “In the premier intelligence institution,” the report notes, referring to ISI, “religiosity replaced accountability.” The meaning is not complicated. India is the only enemy.
Pakistan’s security regime defines sovereignty in what might be called Indian terms. This is not new; it claims Kashmir but calmly hands over a part under its control to China. America does not respect Pakistani sovereignty over its skies, and uses drones where and when it wants. Protest from Islamabad is token, if not hypocritical. Accommodation with China or America is justified by realpolitik, but any effort at adjustment with India, even along the Cease Fire Line, internationally acknowledged as the acceptable dividing line, is dismissed as “capitulation”.
The people and most politicians of Pakistan have inched away from anti-India obsession, but the military-religious pincer is so strong that even elected governments feel locked in, helpless. Peace between India and Pakistan is blocked not by ground reality, but by ghosts in the mind. In the meantime, worry about the cost of a bribe.
