The High Court's finding against former police officer Wan Muhammad Azri Wan Deris aka Papagomo and ordered him to pay RM500,000 in a defamation claim yesterday will boost respect for the law among rogue bloggers, says lawyer N Surendran.

This would certainly strengthen the multi-million ringgit defamation suit that Opposition Leader Anwar has filed against Wan Muhammad Azri, better known as the blogger Papagomo.

NONE "Papagomo is another tool of Umno to defame and publish scandalous, fake news about the opposition and we welcome the court decision to end dirty politics and his defamatory lies," Surendran ( left ) told Malaysiakini .

Anwar has filed a defamation suit against Papagomo for linking him to another man in a sex video , but Wan Muhammad Azri has for a long time denied that he is Papagomo.

Surendran, who described Wan Muhammad Azri as "the worst kind of blogger... vulgar and dirty", confirmed that Anwar's case against Papagomo would go to trial next January.

"Irrespective of today's court decision, we already have enough evidence linking Wan Muhammad Azri to Papagamo. It was ridiculous of him to keep denying it," said Surendran, who is also Padang Serai MP.

'He has been going on a rampage'

Another opposition politician, Rafizi Ramli, had also mulled suing Papagomo for his extremely personal attacks on opposition figures, often without justification.

"Until we could find a way to expose him, he has been going on a rampage," Rafizi said. "This is a test case and the court has sent a strong signal to every blogger out there who behaves like Papagomo."

NONE Rafizi ( right ) said that his earlier decision not to sue was because as a politician, he weighed the impact of his actions on his  party.

However, he hoped that more people would now come forward to sue Papagomo, or Wan Muhammad Azri, whom he described as "extremely cowardly" for not owning up to his comments even when exposed.

"I think we took exception to Papagomo because he had a following among the conservative sections of Malaysia and we needed to expose him for his hypocrisy," he said.

Rafizi, the PKR director of strategy, took offence with Papagomo for blogging that he had been sacked from his job in Petronas because of disciplinary issues.

This was published just before the May 5 general election , which saw Rafizi elected to Parliament as the MP for Pandan.

Papagomo on board Scorpene

PAS vice-president Husam Musa and DAP's Lim Guan Eng have also been reported to have filed suits against Papagomo.

Husam took the blogger to court for allegedly posting an article linking the PAS leader to a woman in a posting titled ‘Exclusive photos of prospective Kelantan MB holding hands with a China doll'.

Papagomo also published a photo of a victim who was allegedly sexually harassed by Lim's 15-year-old son, which turned out be untrue, with the woman publicly denouncing the matter.

However, their lawyers could not be immediately reached for comment on the status of their cases.

More trouble lies ahead for Wan Muhammad Azri. A police report was filed against him last month by the MCA Youth, for making racist remarks online.

"Since Papagomo has been identified, I hope the police can start to investigate him," MCA Youth central committee member Chong Sin Woon said when contacted.

NONE Chong ( second from right ) had earlier said that the MCA filed the police report because the government needed to punish such wrongdoers under the Sedition Act.

Papagomo was arrested in May in the wake of the 13th general election for a comment in his blog that called for Chinese Malaysians to be harmed. He is, however, yet to charged by the police.

Under this situation, Papagomo could well be wishing that he should have taken his own retirement from blogging seriously, when he publicly announced it in a tweet in June this year.

Papagomo is among a group of elite bloggers who have direct links with Umno leaders.

He was on board the KD Tun Razak when then-defence minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi invited Penang Chief Minister Lim to tour the controversial submarine in 2011.