[hang nadim] RPK yet to give statement......

Monday April 25, 2011

PUTRAJAYA: Fugitive blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin has yet to give his statement to the police despite saying he is willing to be interviewed.

In his latest posting in Malaysia Today, Raja Petra claimed he had informed a senior police officer from Bukit Aman of his readiness to be interviewed provided it was held in the hotel where he was staying in Bangkok and not at the Malaysian Embassy there.

The officer had met him and his lawyers in the hotel on Saturday evening.

However, he claimed the officer had refused his offer to be interviewed at the hotel.

“I informed him (the officer) that I volunteer to make my statement but he told me that he was no longer interested to take my statement. And that was how the Bangkok drama ended at 2am,” he wrote.

He said the officer was earlier involved in a heated argument with his (Raja Petra's) lawyers Haris Ibrahim and Amarjit Sidhu over the purpose of the interview.

“My lawyers demanded to know what the whole thing was about. The officer appeared evasive,” he said, adding that was why his lawyers had advised him against agreeing to the interview.

Raja Petra was in Bangkok to give a talk to Malaysians there about his Malaysian Civil Liberties Movement.

He is the chairman of the movement while Haris is the president.

Raja Petra claimed that he had been informed by an embassy official on Saturday that the police were interested to record his statement regarding a statutory declaration he made in 2008.

However, he said, the officer later told his lawyers that his statement was required over a police report lodged against him on April 14 following a newspaper report on his TV3 interview which touched on the statutory declaration.

In the interview, Raja Petra revealed that the statutory declaration linking Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor with the murder of Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu was based on information that was fed to him by third parties with links to prominent politicians, including PKR adviser Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.