KUALA LUMPUR, March 27 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak is keen to meet Kulim Bandar Baru MP Zulkifli Noordin who claimed he was instructed to link the prime minister and his wife to the sensational Altantuya Shaariibuu murder.
Zulkifli made the claim in his first address to Parliament last Wednesday as an independent — weeks after being sacked from PKR for indiscipline. But he has refused to say if his former party had ordered him to do so.
“I will gladly meet Zul Noordin. I want to find out the truth. The truth will come out soon,” Najib told reporters after chairing an Umno supreme council meeting at the party headquarters here.
Najib and his wife have denied all links to the murder but remain clouded by allegations as the two elite policemen convicted of Altantuya’s murder were once part of their security detail. A Najib associate, political analyst Abdul Razak Baginda, was acquitted of all charges linked to the murder.
Zulkifli had alleged that he was offered “a reward that could shake someone’s faith” by a third party to draft a statutory declaration to implicate Najib and Rosmah, saying the offer was made in the course of the trial where he was the counsel for Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri, one of the three accused in the murder.
Though he did not reveal who the third party was, speculation is rife that the accusation was targeted towards the top leadership of his former party.
Zulkifli said later he would like to meet the PM to apologise for the alleged links to the case. Najib has sworn on the Quran that he is not linked to the case.
The Altantuya murder was one of the primary ammunition used by the opposition to attack the ruling Barisan Nasional government before Election 2008 and subsequently for most of the nine by-elections since the landmark vote which saw the opposition Pakatan Rakyat sweep through four more states and win 82 federal seats.
Azilah and his co-accused Corporal Sirul Azhar have appealed against their sentence but the opposition has persistently tried to link Najib and wife to the murder.
It is not known if the allegation was Zulkifli’s promised surprise in the Parliament but the indepedent MP has found support among the three other lawmakers who walked out of PKR over the past month.
The three others are Datuk Seri Zahrain Mohd Hashim (Bayan Baru), Tan Tee Beng (Nibong Tebal) and Mohsin Fadzli Samsuri (Bagan Serai).
Until early last week, Zulkifli was defending Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in a qazaf or false declaration suit in the Syariah Court brought against the de facto PKR leader’s accuser Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, who complained of sodomy.
Zulkifli was one of Anwar’s original lawyers in the first sodomy trial in 1998 after Anwar was sacked as deputy prime minister and finance minister by then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
No comments:
Post a Comment