Malaysia's Biggest Opposition Party Under Threat

On May 5, the opposition Democratic Action Party became the second-largest political party in Malaysia, drubbing its main rival for Chinese affections, the Malaysian Chinese Association and taking 38 seats in Parliament. The election made the DAP, as the party is known, a powerhouse in Malaysian politics, with the legitimate claim to represent the country's Chinese, who make up 24.9 percent of the country's population.

Today, however, the 48-year-old DAP's status is in doubt amid allegations that the government, headed by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, has set out to put the party out of business in the wake of its electoral success. 

Malaysia's Registrar of Societies on Monday invalidated the party's Dec. 15, 2012 central executive committee election over alleged intraparty irregularities during its annual general meeting after two DAP members, the vice chairman and secretary of a local branch, lodged reports in January, saying the party's election results had been manipulated to exclude them. 

Tellingly, the Home Minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, announced the decision against the DAP rather than waiting for the Registry of Societies to deliver a formal letter. The letter was delivered Thursday, containing the directive to hold fresh party elections.

In any case, the party's executive committee has now been ruled illegal and a new election of executive committee members must be held within a specified period, probably 30 to 60 days, according to the registry. The party, however, is refusing to hold a new election, meaning the registry could put the party out of business. 

The facts appear up for grabs. Certainly the DAP appears to have made an embarrassing error in the election. 

"It's their own members who took out the complaints," said the head of a think tank in Kuala Lumpur. "It was a huge embarrassment to them during the election. This is registry of societies business, it has nothing to do with anybody. The DAP, as paranoid as they are, say they are under siege." 

The DAP strategist Chin Tong acknowledged in an interview that the party had erred in computing results of the election, but that it had rectified the mistake. In any case, it is questionable why the action is being taken now. Although the agency investigated the situation earlier this year and issued a letter that put the validity of the central executive committee in doubt, in the end it cleared the party for the general election. After first refusing to allow the DAP to use its "rocket" symbol on election materials, the registry relented and allowed its use.Read more.

Crime Has No Statute Of Limitations

Hantu Laut

The 1974 killing of the IGP was never solved.

Questions are still being asked but Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak was reported to have said a couple of years back, it would be difficult to reopen the case as "it happened a long time ago."

Someone should tell the now Prime Minister that crimes have no "statue of limitations"

Onerous, is on the police to solve murder cases, but when luck ran out and lackadaisical attitude takes over the police ran into a brick wall. 

In the old days the police had better crime-busting work and higher rate of success.

Today, many high profile murder cases remained unsolved. The police found them too confounding to sleuth around and do a Sherlock. Detective work is also deductive work, needs not only lots of skill, but lots of passion to unlock the puzzle.

No justice system is perfect, innocent people have been sent to the gallows and the guilty have gone scot free, but police work to catch the perpetrators must not stop.A file can be closed, but should be reopened if new evidence surfaced. Serious crime has no "statute of limitations". Till death do us part.

Malaysian police seemed to have lost the passion for real detective work, depending too much on direct evidence rather than pursuing  circumstantial evidence where and when direct evidence is lacking. 

Collection of circumstantail evidence can become "colloborating evidence" that can establish or refute whether the accused is guilty or not.

The truth is, gathering circumstantial evidence is tedious and require much more police work than direct evidence and police investigators assigned to such work must have a nose for it, which is telling why many murder cases have gone unsolved. 

Read below how the police lost its mojo.

Good Cops, Bad Cops And All

Are We Going To The Dogs, Literally ?

Hantu Laut

I still can't get over the arrest of dog trainer Maznah Mohd Yusof for what she did some three years ago. The video must have been there all along until some religious zealots saw it that ignited their ire, ignorance and fanaticism.

For some Muslims dogs are not considered dirty if you handle it according to Islamic rites. My late grandfather and late father,  both devout Muslims kept two large German Shepherd as guard dogs at the house on a farmland up in the country completely isolated from other neighbours. The nearest neighbour was half a mile away. Your best security alarm those days were dogs. No wonder they called dog, a man's best friend.



Read here, how she was remanded on such ridiculous allegation.

Never mind that, but how the heck the police was so quick to the gun and arrested her on God knows what ground is beyond comprehension. Was the Home Ministry complicit to the quick action of the police?

It is obvious crime-busting has taken a back seat, more efforts are spent on this kind of inconsequential cases than going after real criminals.

How can the government allow such repugnant action against an innocent girl on such flimsy allegations of insulting the Islamic faith, pandering to a handful of religious zealots, that bespoke culture more than religion.

Who is running the country, the politicians or the ulamahs?

Read a percipient article on the unfortunate affair: In the dog house for being kind

Malaysia Worries Over a Crime Wave

Contract hits raise concern over rising street violence

Two contract-killing attempts - one successful - on Malaysian streets have focused attention and growing anger on perceptions of a worrying rise in violent crime in the country, turning it into a political issue between Malays and Chinese as well.

An alarmed Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak held a press conference to say the government is prepared to give the police whatever is needed to fight crime and expressed concern over the spate of killings, saying it affected public confidence and increased fear with regard to security and serious crime.

In the most spectacular incident, banker Hussain Ahmad Najadi, 75, the founder and head of Arab-Malaysian Development Bank, was gunned down along with his wife on the street as they walked to his car. Hussain was hit in the chest and lower abdomen and died on the spot while his wife was hit in the arm and leg. She survived the shooting.

The second shooting occurred on July 27 when a gunman riding pillion on a motorcycle pulled up next to a car occupied by R Sri Sanjeevan, the head of a local anti-crime organization called MyWatch, and shot him in the chest when the car stopped at a traffic light in a town in Negeri Sembilan state. Sanjeevan remains in critical but stable condition in a local hospital.

The two incidents are hardly similar. For instance, there is widespread conjecture that Hussain was killed over a land deal gone bad, and Sanjeevan had publicly said he had identified links between policemen and drug dealers, and that he intended to make them public, and unnamed forces on either side of that equation may have attempted to silence him.

However, the shootings tie in with the widening spread of violence including a series of contract killings, such as that in April of the Customs Department director general, Shaharuddin Ibrahim, who was shot dead at a traffic light while being driven to work. The department's highest-ranking uniformed official and one who is believed to have gone after illegal schemes, his death is the focus of a task force that so far has turned up no suspects.

Nor are those alone. The Penang Institute has identified 38 gun murders between January and April of 2013, a shocking figure for a country unused to such carnage. Two street killings took place last week in addition to the shootings of Hussain and Sanjeevan. Street murders by gun have been averaging two a week, according to statistics. A 26-year-old Indian with a criminal record was shot and killed on the street today, according to local news reports. Read more.