KUALA LUMPUR, April 5 (Bernama) -- Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is no longer fit to be opposition leader following one scandal after another involving him, said Nibong Tebal Member of Parliament (MP) and one-time Anwar supporter, Tan Tee Beng.
"The many controversies involving him (Anwar) will not make him an effective political leader," Tan told reporters at the Parliament lobby, here Tuesday.
"The people don't need a leader who is necessarily a saint, but he must be free of all these encumbrances," he said, referring to the latest controversy, namely a sex video recording allegedly involving the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR)de facto leader.
Businessman Datuk Shazryl Eskay Abdullah, who claimed to be Anwar's close friend and had known him since 1996, had on March 24 handed over to police a video of a sex act which he claimed involved a senior opposition leader.
The video recording was earlier shown by Eskay and two other individuals, collectively known as "Datuk T", to a selected group of media reporters and editors at Carcosa Seri Negara here, on March 21 with the intention of exposing "who Anwar really is".
Anwar then lodged a police report, stating that he was not the man in the sex video.
On Monday, the video clip was uploaded to YouTube by someone calling himself powercam and believed to be from Thailand, and then posted by some bloggers on their blogsites before it was removed from YouTube.
Tan, who quit PKR and became an independent MP before joining Parti Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air (Kita) in February, when asked whether the opposition members would continue to support Anwar, said:
"As of now, I can only say that my old friends in PKR, PAS and DAP appear not to be supporting (Anwar), but they are just denying that the man in the sex video was him (Anwar)," he said.
Meanwhile, Tumpat MP Datuk Kamaruddin Jaafar said PAS was still supportive of Anwar although the sex video linked to him was already on the Internet.
He added that the revelation would not threaten support for Anwar as such tactics had been used since 1998 when Anwar was accused of sodomy.
Titiwangsa MP Dr Lo'Lo' Mohd Ghazali said the distribution of the sex video recording linked to Anwar was an attempt to shame the opposition leader.
"Although I have not seen the video recording posted on the Internet, I believe the man in the video was not Anwar, as refuted by his wife (Datin Seri Wan Azizah Wan Ismail) today."
Ulama Association of Malaysia secretary-general Dr Mohd Roslan Mansor in a statement said the association regretted the showing of the sex video to the mainstream media, and that the distribution of the video was against journalistic ethics.
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