Bukit Aman: Cops not out to smear Najib's reputation, raids followed SOP

 PETALING JAYA: Bukit Aman has refuted claims that the police were out to smear Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak’s reputation in connection with recent raids on premises connected to the former prime minister.

 

Bukit Aman Commercial Crime Investigation Department (CCID) director Comm Datuk Seri Amar Singh said the police adhered to standard operating procedure (SOP) in conducting the raids and press conferences on the matter.

 

“We have a duty to the public to disclose what we discovered and seized.

 

“There is no question of not adhering to the SOP,” he told The Star on Friday.

 

He was responding to Najib’s son Datuk Mohd Nazifuddin questioning the motive behind the recent series of raids and press conferences conducted by the police.

The latter alleged that all this was done to incite public anger against the former prime minister.

 

“We followed the SOP during the raids as well as when giving the press conferences.

 

“It is the same as any other raid such as a drug raid where we disclosed the items seized as well as its value,” Amar said, adding that the police were being transparent.

 

On Thursday (July 5), Mohd Nazifuddin asked: “Isn’t it a standard operating procedure not to share such details while investigations are ongoing? Is it done just to further ostracise my father?”

 

He also hit out at the Pakatan Harapan Government, his ire aimed especially at Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

 

“The New Malaysia is not quite different from the Malaysia it was 30 years ago,” he had said in a statement.

 

“The selective prosecution that took place bore an uncanny resemblance to the past, just with a different subject, but the prime minister is still the same,” he said, in an apparent reference to Dr Mahathir, then the prime minister, who sacked his then deputy Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who was tried and convicted for abuse of power and sodomy.

 

The sodomy conviction was later overturned, and Dr Mahathir and Anwar are now political allies in Pakatan.