RPK says will return if no ISA for him
To back his claim, he issued an open offer to Najib to “guarantee me that I will not be placed under ISA and forget another six charges I know they were preparing, and I will come back and fight the sedition and criminal defamation cases.”
By Shannon Teoh, The Malaysian Insider
LONDON, July 10 — Going to musicals, enjoying dinner with a group of Malaysian friends until 11pm, and speaking at public events.
Raja Petra Kamarudin, the controversial blogger that the Malaysian police claims it is actively hunting, hardly seems like a man in hiding.
Or, as many reports have put it, a fugitive.
It is a term he bristles at. He said detention without trial is the only thing stopping him from returning home to Malaysia.
“Why am I being called a fugitive, or runaway, or worse, that I absconded? Like I embezzled money and fled the country,” he told The Malaysian Insider in an exclusive interview here.
The writer of the No Holds Barred column in web portal, Malaysia Today, insisted that since he is not convicted of any crime and nor were there any standing charges or arrest warrants, he cannot possibly be classified as a fugitive.
He also does not have to appear for the appeal against his release from the Internal Security Act (ISA), a law that allows for detention without trial at the prerogative of the home minister, a case which has seen no progress since Raja Petra left Malaysia in May 2009 .
However, critics point out that he was not in the country when an arrest warrant was issued after he failed to show up for the hearing on a criminal defamation charge last year, resulting in a discharge not amounting to an acquittal in November as the police failed to execute the warrant.
But the man known by his initials, RPK, claimed he left the country not because he wanted to flee charges of sedition and criminal defamation, but that his sources had informed him that a new ISA detention order was being prepared at the time.
“We were winning all the court cases. We were making the government look stupid. My lawyers to this day regret that we had to leave,” he said of the charges levelled at him due to his accusation that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and his wife, Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, were involved in the death of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shariibuu, and a related submarine deal that French authorities are now investigating for an alleged irregularity in commission payment, said to amount to a whopping RM500 million.
To back his claim, he issued an open offer to Najib to “guarantee me that I will not be placed under ISA and forget another six charges I know they were preparing, and I will come back and fight the sedition and criminal defamation cases.”
