PKR has applauded Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar for his remarks on alleged gambling kingpin Paul Phua.

   

Albeit subtle, Rafizi Ramli said, the police chief had disagreed with lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah's assertion.

"No matter how you read it (Khalid’s comments), it is a repudiation of Shafee and telling him not to be a power broker," the PKR vice-president told Malaysiakini .

Rafizi was responding to a Malaysiakini report yesterday, where Khalid ( left ) told Phua to focus on his charges and confirmed there were Malaysians living abroad who were members of the transnational crime organisation known as 14K.

Prior to that, Shafee claimed that the police made a mistake in their report on Phua, who is facing legal proceedings in the United States, arguing that the 14K triad did not exist in Malaysia.

The senior lawyer, who has close links with Umno, made the statement after it was revealed that Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi penned a letter to the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in defence of Phua.

Shafee, who claimed that the minister wrote the letter to set the record straight, added that he was speaking on behalf of Phua's US-based lawyers.

Over the weekend, Zahid too stated that the triad did not operate here.

'Shafee is not police spokesperson'

Meanwhile, Rafizi ( right ) said Khalid's "subtlety was understandable" given that the IGP had to walk a tightrope between the minister and the need to defend the police's image.

However, he stressed what was alarming was that the home minister could be seen as being closely associated with a lawyer and in the process, setting aside police investigations.

"The impression given is that the home minister can allow a power broker to override the police," he said.

Noting that the investigations into Phua took several years and involved various jurisdictions, Rafizi said it was not Shafee's position to speak on behalf of the Malaysian police.

"Unless the IGP appointed him as a spokesperson for the police, which he did not.

"So it is shocking how a lawyer can so easily dismiss the police report as a mistake," he added.

Rafizi, who is also the MP for Pandan, vowed that the opposition would dig further into this issue once the Parliament sitting commences in March.

Among others, he said, Pakatan Rakyat lawmakers would look into whether there was interference in police work concerning Phua, who owns gambling businesses overseas.

"Both Shafee and Zahid must come clean," Rafizi added.

Meanwhile, Malaysiakini also reported that Phua's legal team had retracted Zahid’s letter, which was earlier tendered to the US court, on the grounds that Putrajaya had objected to it.

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