Karpal to Nazri: Quit now, you’re incompetent

DAP chairman Karpal Singh says Nazri is incompetent for making a statement supporting the use of the Emergency Ordinance to detain the six PSM leaders.

GEORGE TOWN: Veteran lawyer and DAP chairman Karpal Singh has had enough of Nazri Abdul Aziz’s bumbling ways – he told Nazri, the de facto law minister, to quit the Cabinet immediately on grounds of incompetence.

Karpal said he was shocked by Nazri’s public statement that the Emergency Ordinance (EO) was used in the name of national security to detain the six Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) leaders ahead of the July 9 Bersih 2.0 rally.

Nazri has suggested that the detained six were trying to rekindle the communist ideology and claimed that attempts to resurrect such ideologies existed in the country.

But Karpal dismissed Nazri’s accusations as “assertions without justification”.

He said Nazri’s statement had rendered him unfit to hold office as minister in charge of legal affairs in the Prime Minister’s Department, or for that matter in any other capacity in the Cabinet.

Karpal said this is not the first time Nazri has put his foot in his mouth and made public statements which reflected his incompetence to hold public office.

“Nazri must tender his resignation because of his incompetence. He has forfeited his right to continued membership of the Cabinet to which he has brought justified disgrace.

“Nazri should be man enough to take this step which, under the circumstances, is more than warranted,” Karpal, the two-term Bukit Gelugor MP, said in a statement here today.

He was commenting on the affidavit filed by Bukit Aman federal police through Kamarul Zaman Mamat from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) in reply to affidavits submitted by the family members of detained PSM activists to support their habeas corpus application due to be heard tomorrow.

Karpal said Nazri’s public statement has been blown to smithereens by what were revealed in Kamarul Zaman’s affidavits.

He said Kamarul Zaman was in an authoritative position to make a sworn statement that the six were detained under EO for their alleged roles in Bersih 2.0 and not for activities related to communism, although the police grounds for the detention were baseless in the first place.

Karpal added that the serious contradiction with regard to the grounds for the arrest and detention of the PSM leaders was sufficient for the habeas corpus application to succeed tomorrow.

“It reflects serious mala fides on the part of the police in relation to the arrest and detention of the PSM six under the EO,” he said.
In view of this, Karpal called on Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein to direct Bukit Aman police to withdraw its affidavit-in-reply and immediately release the detainees.

He also wants the government to pay the detainees for both aggravated and exemplary damages for detaining them without basis since June 25.