Bless your soul, dear Altantuya (wish you had better taste in men, though)...

From French subs to French subpoenas...

Courtesy of Malaysiakini

Seven years have elapsed since a 28-year-old Mongolian beauty named Altantuya Shaariibuu was abducted in front of Abdul Razak Baginda's residence by three plainclothes police officers (Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri, Corporal Sirul Azahar and Lance Corporal Rohaniza) around dusk. Private investigator Balasubramaniam a/l Perumal, who was at the scene, later stated in a statutory declaration on 3 July 2008 that a mystery man arrived soon afterwards in a blue Proton Saga to check on the situation and then drove off. Bala subsequently identified the mystery man as Nasir Safar, special aide to then deputy prime minister Najib Razak.

In early November 2006 the sensational news broke around the world that the Mongolian beauty, reported missing by her cousin and traveling companions, had been brutally executed with two bullets to her head and her body blown to smithereens with military-grade C4 plastic explosives in a forest clearing near Puncak Alam (where forensic experts later found DNA traces of at least half a dozen other unidentified murder victims).

Two of Altantuya's abductors, Chief Inspector Azilah and Corporal Sirul, were found guilty of premeditated murder after a ridiculously tedious trial that dragged on 159 days. Musa Safri, their commanding officer and security chief to Najib Razak was not required to even testify. Nor was the Head of Immigration called to the stand to explain how details of three Mongolian women's arrival in Malaysia sometime in September 2006 had been completely deleted from the Immigration Department's computer database.

Indeed, on 23 August 2013, Azilah and Sirul were acquitted and released by an Appeals Court, which declared that the prosecution's case was fatally flawed. Although Sirul Azahar had earlier confessed to committing the atrocity under instruction from Chief Inspector Azilah, with an offer of RM100,000 as reward, both killers now roam free.

Needless to say, Najib Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, were never investigated and were deliberately omitted from the witness list. For full details of this sordid saga, click on all the embedded links.

In a land where justice hides in shame, there can be no future worth anticipating.

I have posthumously adopted Altantuya Shaariibuu as my soul-sister and vow to keep her memory alive - at least until the ones who ordered her gruesome murder are brought to justice and her spirit at last finds peace.

THE MURDER OF ALTANTUYA SHAARIIBUU

[First published 19 October 2010]