(July 22): Police said today they will check the authenticity of the emails received from The Edge Media Group through their own experts as part of its investigation into the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal.

"Yes, my officer at commercial crime has received the documents and information from The Edge on behalf of the task force," said Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar.

The Edge said that it had referred the emails shown to them in connection with 1MDB scandal to an IT forensic expert to confirm their authenticity before pursuing the stories.

The inspector-general of police responded by saying police would use their own experts in this matter.

"They have their own expert, we have ours, too. They look at different angle and we look at different angle," said Khalid.

Publisher and group CEO of The Edge Media Group Ho Kay Tat yesterday said the media organisation was shown thousands of emails and document attachments by a person they did not name.

"We read scores of them and were convinced of their authenticity because of the sheer volume and the email trails. We subsequently had an IT forensic expert confirm that there was no reason to worry that they were fakes," he said in a statement yesterday.

The Edge on Monday handed documents, printed emails and a hard disk to Bank Negara.

Yesterday, the same set was given to the Commercial Crime Investigation Department (CCID) of the police.

Ho also gave a statement to CCID.

A special task force comprising officers from the police, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and Attorney General's Chambers is overseeing the investigation into the 1MDB money trail.

Six bank accounts were frozen and the task force has seized documents linked to 17 accounts at two banks for further investigation.

This follows a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on July 2 which alleged that US$700 million from companies linked with 1MDB was deposited into Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak's personal bank accounts.

Early this month, Attorney-General Tan Sri Gani Patail said the task force was going through documents taken from the premises of SRC International Sdn Bhd, Gandingan Mentari Sdn Bhd and Ihsan Perdana Sdn Bhd.

The three companies were also named in the WSJ report.

"After reviewing and analysing the documents retrieved during the raids, I have advised the task force on the next course of action," Gani was quoted as saying.

Najib has denied the allegations and said it was a political ploy engineered by his opponents, including former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The New York-based WSJ, however, insisted that their investigation was based on solid documentation. – The Malaysian Insider