Azmi: China trip not for damage control

The Straits Times, Singapore
20 December 2005

Azmi: China trip not for damage control

By Carolyn Hong
The Straits Times

Home Minister Azmi Khalid yesterday denied that his hastily-arranged trip to China was a damage control exercise after a video of a naked woman being made to perform ear-squats in police custody brought protests from the Chinese government.

The woman, initially believed to be an ethnic Chinese, but later revealed to be local Malay, was secretly taped doing the squats after being arrested for a drug offence. Datuk Azmi said his trip to China was arranged before the video became public. It was to refute the perceptions that the Malaysian authorities were negatively profiling Chinese tourists as illegal immigrants or prostitutes, he said.

'My visit to China was on the instructions of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to tackle other issues,' Datuk Azmi said in a statement. He was forced to issue a statement after Malaysians demanded to know why police kept the woman's identity a secret for three weeks.

It was only last Tuesday that it became known that she was a Malay when the 22-year-old woman testified at an independent panel investigating the video clip. Datuk Azmi did not say if he was aware of her identity before his trip to China but PM Abdullah and his deputy Najib Razak had said that they only found out recently.

PM Abdullah, however, defended the police for keeping silent, saying that the anger was so palpable at that time that the people would not have believed the police. 'Who could have revealed the identity earlier? The police? Do you think people would have believed them? People would have accused them of a cover-up,' he told reporters on Sunday. He urged people to allow the independent panel to complete its report next month, and to stop speculating.

The panel wrapped up its hearings last week but the debate flared up again after politicians turned their guns on an opposition MP who had brought the video clip to public attention.

Several senators last week urged action against Ms Teresa Kok for showing 'pornography' in Parliament, and stoking racial tension by suggesting that a Chinese woman was being mistreated by a Malay policewoman. Ms Kok, however, maintained that she had never identified the woman's ethnic background.

The New Straits Times yesterday carried a full page of letters from angry readers who took the senators to task for barking up the wrong tree.'The senators should ask the police why the nationality of the nude squat victim was not provided to MPs and the public immediately,' wrote a reader. A doctor from Penang also wrote to refute the claim that squats could expel objects hidden in the private parts, saying that it was clear that the exercise was to humiliate the detainee.