It’s so nice to be able to gloat
I felt good. They tried to screw me and now they got screwed instead. They thought they would punish me for walking away by charging me under Section 501 instead of 203. And now they realise it was a big mistake and that they set a trap for me which ended up trapping themselves instead.
THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin
It’s a nice feeling when you are able to look the Malaysian Police to their face, laugh at them, and tell them that they fucked up big time. It’s equally satisfying when they admit it by not admitting it but by trying to put the blame of this super-blunder on someone else.
This was last night. I was already sleeping when my phone rang. My wife answered the phone and told me that the police were waiting for me downstairs. I called Haris Ibrahim who told me to wait in my room. “I will come over and we will go downstairs together,” he said.
My wife said she was also coming and the three of us went to meet the three police officers. They no longer needed me to go to the Malaysian embassy for my official statement to be recorded, they told me. This was a social visit. They merely wanted to have a ‘friendly chat’.
We adjourned to the lobby bar for a drink and a ‘friendly chat’. Basically, this whole ‘friendly chat’ was about my TV3 interview in Perth. There are some ‘gaps’ not covered by the interview, which they needed my help to fill in.
Understandably, the TV3 interviewer is not a police officer, so he did not ask certain questions that the police would have asked. After all, it was an interview and not a crime investigation.
I asked them whether they had seen the full length TV3 interview. They confirmed that they had. I then asked them how long was the interview. How many minutes? One police officer said it was 17 minutes.
I turned and glared at this police officer. “I said the full length interview. The full length is not 17 minutes. It is more than one hour, maybe one hour 40 minutes or so.”
ACP Aziz, his boss, replied he had seen the full-length version. “One hour plus?” I asked him. He confirmed it was one hour plus.
He then asked me a few things that were not mentioned in the interview, the gaps that I was talking about.
I then took this long-awaited opportunity to laugh in their faces. I had waited three years to finally look ACP Aziz in his face and laugh at him and imply that he is an idiot. And I did not mince my words to make him feel small. (Of course, he kept deflecting by saying that that was the decision of the Attorney-General, not his decision).
Anyway, before I ramble on and get myself into another of my cheong hei articles, let me cut to the chase.
When I signed my statutory declaration, the police (the police blame the AG, of course) did not want to charge me under Section 203 — that is, a crime for signing a false SD. If they did then they would have had to prove it and I, in turn, would be allowed to challenge the charge by bringing my witnesses and evidence to court.
By charging me under Section 501 they can bypass all this because the truth of the matter is not material to the charge. Therefore, the court is not interested in the truth because even if what I signed in my SD is true I still go to jail.
And that was why I refused to respond to the charge and shouted at the judge that the charge is both defective and mala fide. But the court ignored me and instead took that as a plea of not guilty.
Clever right? Not quite, because over the next three years they spun the story that I had made an allegation against Rosmah Mansor, Col Norhayati Hassan and Col Aziz Buyong. In fact, the two colonels even sued me for RM1 million.
For three years I had to live under this dark cloud, the man who made that stupid allegation against Rosmah. And they played up this issue to the hilt.
And now this issue is hurting them bad and they want to untangle themselves from this web of deceit that they themselves spun. They realise that the issue of me making an allegation against Rosmah will not go away, as they had hoped, and Najib Tun Razak’s enemies in Umno are trying to use this issue to bring him down — just like how they brought Abdullah Ahmad Badawi down two years ago.
But how are they going to get themselves out of this sticky situation? It was they who charged me under Section 501 instead of section 203. It was they who spun the story that I made an allegation against Rosmah. Now they want that story corrected.
And that was how they came up with his hare-brained idea of the TV3 interview.
And this was their second blunder.
Their agenda was to make it clear that I never made any allegation against Rosmah — not then, not now. Some dunggu in TV3, however, decided to spin it another way. Instead of coming out with the story of me NEVER alleging that Rosmah was at the scene of the crime (and that the allegation was in fact made by someone else but reported by me), they spun it that I have now made a U-turn.
Maybe they thought they could kill two birds with one stone. Clear Rosmah and discredit me at the same time.
Clever right?
Not so clever. By spinning this ‘Raja Petra did a U-turn’ story, they just got themselves into a Bala SD1 and SD2 situation (a.k.a. ‘Bala U-turn’). Maybe they thought they could kill me. Instead, they failed to get the people to focus on what they wanted the people to focus on.
Last night I asked ACP Aziz why he tried to screw me with the wrong charge. He said that it was not he but the AG who did this. He then blamed me for it. “Why did you not clarify this when we called you for interrogation?” he asked me. (I in fact walked off when he tried to interrogate me and this was probably why he wanted to fix me up with the wrong charge).
“Can’t you read simple English?” I asked him. “My English is so simple even Malay-medium students can understand what I write. Pasal tu lah, suruh pergi sekolah tak mahu belajar.”
“It was not me, the decision on the charge was the AG,” he repeated.
“If you had told us what you said in your TV3 interview then we would not all be in this mess. But since you refused to give your statement we did not know the real story and charged you for the wrong crime.”
I felt good. They tried to screw me and now they got screwed instead. They thought they would punish me for walking away by charging me under Section 501 instead of 203. And now they realise it was a big mistake and that they set a trap for me which ended up trapping themselves instead.
First they screwed up on the charge. Then they screwed up on the TV3 interview when they spun it the wrong way. And now they need to crawl back to me, smile sweetly the entire night, buy me a drink, and try to get me on their side. Then they had to continue smiling while I whacked them and called them stupid, much to the delight of Haris who was smirking as the police cringed.
So there you have it. They tried to fix me up in 2008 and it backfired because of the wrong charge. Then they tried to do damage control by interviewing me on TV3 and again it backfired when they spun the U-turn story (and chose the Sarawak elections to air the interview). And now, with their tails between their legs, they need to come and see me on my terms.
Revenge is sweet and is best served cold. I am one satisfied man.