Acting Ipoh district police chief Ibrahim Abu Bakar has claimed that the Human Rights Party (HRP) had been allowed to submit a memorandum to the Perak palace yesterday, but chose not to do so.

“The palace had agreed to allow three or four of the members to submit their memorandum. But I do not know why they refused and instead asked us (police) to submit it,” Ibrahim said when contacted today.

Yesterday, abou NONE t 20 HRP members had tried to submit the memorandum to Sultan Azlan Shah, to protest cases of conversion to Islam involving Perak women or their family-members.

Palace officials agreed to see up to four members but HRP insisted on sending a delegation of seven, leading to a stalemate in the negotiations.

When the protestors failed to convince the police to accept the petition on behalf of the palace, they left the document on top of a police car.

HRP has since claimed that a sergeant-major Jamal proceeded to throw away the memorandum. Video footage shows the officer showing his fist to the protestors.

Publicity stunt?

Ibrahim said he could not comment on this as he had not seen the incident.

Asked if the police would investigate, he said: “Sometimes in protest, maybe some of the things that the police do might not be favoured by the other parties. If he is raising his fist, to me he could just be passionate.”

He also said he does NONE not understand the HRP’s intention.

“If they had just wanted to submit a memorandum, then they should just have done so, since the palace had allowed it. Why did  they act this way?” he asked, noting that it could be a publicity stunt.

“In my view, we were just doing our job to contain the crowd. They were shouting and assembling just 600 metres from the palace (Istana Kinta in Ipoh).

“We even allowed them to have their say with the media. The police are accommodating enough. But at the end of the day, no memorandum was submitted.”

The HRP had collected 5,000 signatures to support the memorandum, which highlighted the predicament of S Banggarma of Tanjong Piandang, M Indira Gandhi and two others.