NGO wants S'wak Report probed on Sirul's leaked 113 statement
NGO Pertubuhan Minda dan Sosial Prihatin (PMSP) has urged police to investigate how whistleblower website Sarawak Report managed to obtain former police commando Sirul Azhar Umar's 113 statement, which they claimed the website made public in a Facebook posting.
"I have done some checking and I found that Sirul's 113 statement was never tendered as evidence in court during the murder trial of Mongolian national Altantuyaa Shaariibuu. The statement is a secret document.
"We ask that the police investigate how Sarawak Report could have obtained it," PMSP deputy president Zakwan Hafiz Ahmad Ansari said outside the Petaling Jaya police headquarters today, before lodging a police report on the matter.
A 113 statement as detailed in the Criminal Procedure Code is a statement recorded from a suspect in a case during, after, or before investigations.
Zakwan theorises that the document may have been leaked while stored at the attorney-general's chambers, kept in police custody or when it was in transit during the 2009 trial.
Sirul's 113 statement was never tendered as evidence but excerpts were circulated on the internet fuelling speculation.
'Probe Sirul's allegations'
In a related matter, Zakwan also lodged a second police report urging the police to investigate allegations made by Sirul in a series of videos that he apparently recorded while in detention.
In the videos, three of which had been made available to Malaysiakini by an anonymous source, Sirul had hinted that parties unknown were trying to influence him to slander Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, denied that Altantuyaa was pregnant at the time of the murder, and emphatically declared that Najib was not involved in any way with the case.
The same source claimed that a fourth video naming those who were supposedly trying to influence Sirul to implicate Najib also exists, but as yet remains unreleased.
The ex-police commando and his former police partner Azilah Hadri were sentenced to death for Altantuyaa's murder after the Federal Court overturned the appellate court's decision to overturn their earlier conviction by the High Court.
Azilah is now on death row appealing his sentence, while Sirul who had fled to Australia before the Federal Court decision, is being detained by Australian authorities at the Villawood Detention Centre after he was picked up for an immigration offence.
The authorities have cleared Najib of any culpability with regard to Altantuya's murder.
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