Who cloned who?

RPK’s website has been defaced and hacked. Arrested, fined, and pressed to reveal sources of information. Raja has also been jailed for libel, sedition, even “insulting Islam.”

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Johny Mercado, The Negros Chronicle

Did Kuala Lumpur clone Manila, Davao or Cebu? Or was it the other way around? They field policemen who moonlight as executioners.

Malaysia’s High Court sentenced Inspector Aziah Hadri and Corporal Sirul Umar Azhar to hang. They were from an elite unit guarding the Prime Minister. They shot Mongolian model Altantuya Shaariibuu, then blew up the 28-year old’s corpse with C-4 military explosives.

Their “no-body-no-case” defense flopped.

Prime Minister Najib Razak denies links with this interpreter and mother of two. Altantuya spoke Russian, English, Mandarin and Japanese. She also had an affair with one of Najib’s closest aides: Abdul Razak Baginda.

The court cleared Baginda. But suspicions, from graft to blackmail, persist. Would two cops act as a death squad on their own?

“Where are the bodies of Salvador “Bubby Dacer” and Emmanuel Corbito?” lawyers for Senator Panfilo Lacson ask: “No body, no case.”

PR man Dacer and driver were also kidnapped by the “elite” Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force team. Both were interrogated, strangled and, like Altantuya, their bodies were burned. UP forensic pathologists identified remains from dental plates, rings, etc. Not me, insists Lacson who led PAOCTF then. Don’t look at me, says Lacson’s chief, the mustachioed President Joseph Estrada. Erap denies he is Bigote – alleged mastermind.

Did PAOCTF’s Michael Ray Aquino and Cezar Mangcao track down Dacer on their own? Just like Insp.Hadri and Cpl. Azhar? Both are in a US federal prison and await extradition. On return, will they sing – or retract? PAOCTF agents seized, then destroyed, documents with Dacer. Were they about the multi-million BMW stock scandal? Probers itch to know. That scam rocked Estrada’s regime.

Licensing laws gag the Malaysian press. Economic pressures are more insidious.“The Malaysian government is the indirect or direct owner of almost all local media,” International Press Institute notes. Thus, Kuala Lumpur mainstream media insists the gallows sentence puts an “end to conspiracy theories.” It won’t.

Across Johore causeway, Singapore newspapers covered the 159-day trial.They’ve reported what Kuala Lumpur censors haven’t firewalled completely: internet and blogs. The most outspoken is 59-year old Columnist Raja Petra Kamarudin. On his website “Malaysia Today,” RPK claims the prime minister and wife, Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, are involved in the Mongolian slay.

Najib admits contacting the lawyer defending his aide. “That’s not interference.”

RPK’s website has been defaced and hacked. Arrested, fined, and pressed to reveal sources of information. Raja has also been jailed for libel, sedition, even “insulting Islam.”

This parrots the March 26 resolution sponsored by Pakistan, Belarus, Venezuela, Egypt and Saudi Arabia at the UN. On surface, it bans “defamation of religion.” In effect, it means blasphemy, notes the Economist. “This is defined as voicing dissent from the official reading of Islam.”

That’s bigotry. And it’d suppress liberty of expression. But that shouldn’t distract from crimes like death squads.

A special tribunal found former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori unleashed esquadrones de la muerte. His“Colina Unit” committed at least 50 murders, when the state crushed the fanatical “Shining Path” rebels. It sentenced Fujimori to 25 years in prison Shouldn’t that jolt mayor Rodrigo Duterte? In Davao, death squads racked up 814 murders, in over a decade. Not a case has been solved.

That’s the same message for Mayor Tomas Osmena, now in Texas for bladder cancer operation.

There’ve been 184 killings in Cebu since Osmena and police chief Pablo Labra unleashed vigilantes. Not a case has been solved either. Whether in Kuala Lumpur, Davao, Cebu or Lima, there’s a human being behind each killing statistic. Read the record.

“Azilah ( gave) me an M5 weapon and silencer ordering “shoot to kill” the Chinese woman,” testified Cpl. Azhar. He didn’t know who she was. She surrendered her jewellery and pleaded not to kill her. She was expecting, she said. “Azilah wrestled the woman to the ground and I fired towards the left side of her head…. Azilah noticed movements in the arm. He ordered me to fire. I then emptied the weapon. With Azilah’s help I put the bag over the head to prevent blood from spilling.

In the woods…I attached the explosives to the victim’s head while Azilah attached explosives on the victim’s legs up to the abdomen…After detonation, I pulled the excess wire into the jeep, left the scene and headed towards the (Special Operations Office) in Bukit Aman where I received 430 ringgits.”

Such impunity can stand only with official tolerance.. It’s cloned here. . “After our ‘work’, we’d meet at Mits KTV bar, on Bacalso highway, near St. Francis Funeral Home,” a Cebu vigilante explained. “That’s where we got paid for our work.” In Davao, “the men who gun down or, and this is becoming more common, knife children in the streets, almost never cover their faces,” writes UN Special Raportteur Philp Alston.

RPK rejected a name-your-price offer to stop writing about Najib and the Mongolian. All Malays, Chinese and Indians who support party in power for gain…are “scum of the earth,” he wrote. “Nothing can justify prostituting yourself.”