Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, trying to deflect rising criticism of yesterday evening’s arrest of three senior editors from The Malaysian Insider on sedition charges, claimed that he had no foreknowledge of the PDRM’s operations concerning the matter.
He asserted to The Malay Mail Online‘s Shazwan Mustafa Kamal that he was not involved in the police force’s “operational” matters, despite being the Cabinet minister in charge of supervising the Royal Malaysian Police.
“I am not directly involved in operational activities of the police. That is purely PDRM’s responsibility,” he said.
“The matter could be because of the police report made by the representative of the Conference of Rulers,” he offered.
Meanwhile, Nur Jazlan Mohamed, the UMNO MP from Pulai, and the chairperson of Parliament’s Public Accounts Commission, slammed the arrests as “excessive”, and a mistake.
“For me, [the arrests] were a mistake. Detaining these editors under the Sedition Act seems excessive,” he opined, when speaking to The Malaysian Insider.
“If there was an offence committed, there would still be no need to have them arrested for sedition. The authorities have several other laws they could have cited in this case.”
Yesterday evening, during a raid on the TMI offices in Mutiara Damansara, PDRM and MCMC officers arrested the newsportal’s managing editor Lionel Morais, Bahasa Malaysia news editor Amin Shah Iskandar, and analysis editor Zulkifli Sulong.
This morning, when they appeared to give a statement at the Dang Wangi police station, TMI CEO and editor-in-chief Jahabar Sadiq and The Edge publisher Ho Kay Tat were also arrested on the same charge.
Know about something happening in KL and Malaysia? Want to share? Send us an email:kl@coconuts.co – don’t just read the news, make it!
