Threatening and abusive phone calls are considered 'standard stuff' for members of the non-governmental group Police Watch and Human Rights Committee.

Its president RN Rajah ( right ) said ever since the five-year-old body started championing cases of custodial deaths on behalf of victim's families, its members have received numerous calls warning them to back off.

Most of the time the callers get abusive, said Rajah, and indicate clearly that they are unhappy with the group's combative style of questioning and challenging police conduct.

"They usually ask us what we hope to achieve when we file a police report. We suspect the calls came from those within the police force because they seemed to know when and where we filed our reports," he told malaysiakini .

But Monday's incident involving group member and lawyer, P Uthayakumar, was something else altogether.

The 42-year-old lawyer was threatened at gunpoint and assaulted by a number of men in a residential area in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur.