MELAKA: Pakatan Harapan has been in power twice but has yet to deliver the reforms Teoh Beng Hock’s family hoped for, says his sister Teoh Lee Lan.
Lee Lan, speaking at a Parti Bersama Malaysia press conference in Batu Berendam on Monday (Nov 2), thanked the party’s sixteen Melaka state election candidates for signing a pledge backing the family’s demands.
“A life was taken. Why have the police not investigated it as murder over the past seventeen years?” she asked.
She said her family had hoped Pakatan would reform the country’s institutions.
“Sadly, the Pakatan government has now been in power twice, but we have not seen any reform of this system, or any action to correct these flawed mechanisms,” she said.
The family, she said, had gone to Parliament and even met the Prime Minister.
“The Prime Minister could agree to all kinds of requests for the police to follow the law and the Constitution, but in the end the police still did not get to the bottom of it,” she said.
Police began investigating the case as wrongful confinement in 2019, and the Attorney General’s Chambers (AGC) classified it as no further action last year, citing insufficient evidence.
The family’s lawyer Steve Chew said the AGC had told the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Monday that the bid to compel a murder investigation was filed out of time.
In court, the AGC argued that the family had known since 2019 that no murder investigation had been opened.
Chew said the family only got a clear answer early this year and had filed within three months.
Justice Norliza Othman will rule on the objection on Nov 17.
Chew said Beng Hock’s son, born after his death, was almost an adult.
“Do you want to make the Teoh family wait another eighteen or seventeen years?” he asked.
Bersama leader Lee Chean Chung, who was present during the press conference, said the pledge called for international criminal investigation experts to reinvestigate the case as murder or culpable homicide.
It also called for comprehensive reform of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and an Anti-Torture Act.
“The Teoh Beng Hock case should not be forgotten with the passage of time, and institutional reform cannot be a mere slogan,” said Lee, a former Petaling Jaya MP who is leading Bersama’s Melaka campaign.
Beng Hock, 30, a Melaka-born political aide to then Selangor executive councillor Ean Yong Hian Wah, was found dead at Plaza Masalam in Shah Alam on July 16, 2009, after being questioned overnight by the MACC.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry found in 2011 that he had been driven to suicide by aggressive questioning, but the Court of Appeal ruled in 2014 that his death was caused by the unlawful act of persons unknown, including MACC officers.
