By the second day of their remand, those arrested at the music venue Rumah Api last week felt like they were broken.

"Quite patah semangat (broken spirit), you know. We were just tired. A lot of us came out really jaded.

"We just went to see a gig but we were charged with conspiring to topple the government,” said one of those remanded, a woman, who spoke to Malaysiakini on condition she is not named.

She was among the 100-plus people picked up in the raid on the popular independent music venue, Rumah Api, last Friday.

The raid was unexpected. Rumah Api, an established venue in the alternative music scene located less than 100 metres from the Ampang traffic police headquarters, has hosted hundreds of music events over the years.

The only difference is, this time, the gig was themed ‘Party Tonight, Revolution Tomorrow’, and it was held on the eve of the Bersih 4 rally.

The woman, who insisted she only came for the music, said they were interrogated about the rally, a supposed revolution and about trying to topple the government.

"The police were trying to implicate us to whatever gathering, I don't know. But the people who were at Rumah Api were basically the people who are the least likely to go for Bersih.

"We told them (the police) everything we knew, which was nothing they wanted to hear," she added.

Humiliation the women suffered...

It was not just the interrogations.

Eight of the 13 women detained were menstruating and they were forced to change their sanitary pads in front of female police personnel throughout the three-day remand period in the Pandan Indah police lock up.

These women were also not allowed to wear underwear, the woman said.

"I was wearing the pad with just the lockup pants. No underwear," she lamented.

They were allowed to contact their family members to bring them their necessities, so she told her sister to bring her sanitary pads and underwear, as well as other hygiene products.

"The person in charge told me that my sister brought me stuff, and I saw a huge bag my sister had brought. She brought me a lot of stuff. But in the end, I was only given a toothbrush, toothpaste and the pads," she said.

Changing guards not informed about pregnant detainee

One of the women, she said, was a pregnant woman in her first trimester, who was forced to constantly ask for her medication and water.

The lock-up guards kept changing, she said, and the new ones were never briefed about the pregnant woman when they took over.

She also revealed that after the Rumah Api women detainees were released, some of them went out to buy hygiene supplies for the other women they shared their cells with in Pandan Indah.

"They (the other women) happily shared their resources with us. It was the least we could do," she said.

Even then, she said, she would have to check if the police passed all the supplies to their former cell mates, considering that she did not receive all the items her sister brought for her.

All of those detained were released yesterday, except for two foreigners, an Indonesian and a Filipino, who had trouble producing their identification papers to the police.

The Filipino, an expatriate who has been working in Malaysia for five years, was released yesterday.

The Indonesian, a tourist is still in detention because there is no record of him entering Malaysia in the Immigration system, despite his passport bearing a stamp from the Malaysia-Singapore immigration counter, through which he entered.

Later this morning, when asked to comment on the allegation, inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar ( photo, above ) rubbished it and declared that it was baseless and meant to damage the police.

"I have checked, no such thing happened.

"Surely we will not ask them to change their sanitary pads in front of us," Khalid, who attended a marine police function in Port Klang, said.

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