(Sept 18): Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak should respond positively to the Al Jazeera documentary on the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu and call for a new investigation in light of the fresh evidence uncovered, DAP said.

The party’s parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang said Najib could no longer remain silent or passive as the international broadcasting agency was standing by its report, which uncovered “new developments” in the Mongolian’s murder.

“Is Najib prepared to respond positively to the Al Jazeera documentary and its call for new investigation into the fresh evidence uncovered?” Lim said in a speech at a DAP event in Sabah last night.

After the documentary aired last week, Australian-based Al Jazeera reporter Mary Ann Jolley urged Malaysian authorities to begin a new probe into the nine-year-old murder although two police personnel have been convicted and sentenced to death.

Jolley was deported by Malaysian authorities on June 14 even though she had not been charged with any crime and was not given any reasons for her deportation.

The Al Jazeera documentary questions whether the two men convicted of Altantuya’s murder – Sirul Azhar Umar and Azilah Hadri – were the “fall guys” for others, citing alleged text messages sent by Sirul suggesting a high-level cover up.

This, Lim said, was not hearsay and neither was the first-hand account of a conversation between Sirul and his relative, in which Sirul alleged that Altantuya’s ex-lover and Najib’s former political adviser, Abdul Razak Baginda, had shot her.

Razak Baginda was charged with abetting in her murder, but was later acquitted.

“In these circumstances, how can Najib be silent or passive to the Al Jazeera offer of cooperation with any Malaysian police investigation that would look into the fresh evidence that came to light when filming the documentary?

“Najib should act consistently as one who did not know Altantuya and want to establish his total innocence in view of the swirling rumours inside and outside the country linking him in some manner to the murder, by ordering a full-scale investigation by establishing a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Altantuya’s murder,” Lim said.

In a response to the documentary, Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali said the prime minister was never implicated during the course of the trial of Altantuya’s murder and that the trial was comprehensive with all relevant witnesses being called to testify.

However, Lim said the newly appointed A-G’s statement was not “worth very much” as a statement to exonerate Najib.

“This is because even a layman without any legal training could retort that a person not implicated in a murder trial does not 100% preclude him from any involvement in the murder.

“Nobody is suggesting that Najib is in any way involved in the Altantuya murder case but the crucial question is whether there had been a thorough police investigation into the murder, and not just whether there had been a murder trial,” the Gelang Patah MP added.

If a thorough investigation had been carried out like Putrajaya had claimed, Lim said there would not be an absence of a motive to kill the Mongolian as both Sirul and Azilah had not known her before killing her. – The Malaysian Insider