The name is Altantuya Shaariibuu. Her name may never make it into school history books, but among Malaysians, this Mongolian woman is almost as well-known as Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.
Unlike her legendary conquering countrymen, her fame is unfortunately founded on her being the hapless victim in one of the most heinous murders in the nation’s history.
The latest development that has brought this murder most foul back into the headlines is the release of her convicted killer - who now claims his innocence and begging for a second chance to live as a free man in Australia in an interview with Al-Jazeera's 101 East programme, aired on Friday (Nov 24).
Former police officer Sirul Azhar Umar who was sentenced to death, with Azilah Hadri, for killing Altantuya in 2006, was set free from an immigration detention centre in Australia, where he had fled to seek asylum in January 2015.
He was among 90 asylum seekers who were released after an Australian High Court ruled on Nov 8 that indefinite immigration detention was unlawful.
It's been 17 years but this sordid crime remains a wound that never heals because so many questions were never answered, chief among them: Who ordered her murder?
Altantuya’s family continues to fight a long and arduous battle for justice.
However, even after the court found in favour of her family’s RM100 million civil suit against Sirul (above), Azilah and Abdul Razak Baginda, the erstwhile lover of Altantuya and a close associate of Najib Abdul Razak who was then deputy prime minister, we are no closer to the truth.
The suit was filed in 2007 and it took 15 years for the court to rule in December last year for the three defendants to pay RM5 million in compensation to the family. Both sides are appealing the verdict and who knows how long that will take.
Upon hearing the verdict, Najib claimed the court decision proved his innocence, which he had always maintained - that he had nothing to do with the killing and he had never met Altantuya - as the family did not name him in the suit.
Najib may think he is absolved and he was never formally linked to the case, but for many of us, he cannot deny or escape the undisputed facts linking him to the case.
Both Azilah and Sirul had served as his bodyguards; Razak was his close aid and Azilah had testified in court that it was Musa Safri, Najib’s aide-de-camp had ordered him to "remove" Altantuya.
If we were a democracy that demands its leaders to be held to the highest standards of integrity and morality, Najib should have resigned and this nation would have been spared the shame of having him as our most corrupt prime minister to date.
Without going too much into the details, of which there are a lot as well as twists and turns, on the surface, this could have been seen as a straightforward lovers' quarrel over money with Altantuya as the jilted mistress demanding US$500,000 from Razak.
If that was the case, why didn’t he just lodge a police report against her for being a nuisance and blackmailing him?
Surely, it would have been easier to use his “connections” to get her deported and bar her from entering the country again.
Instead, Azilah was given a covert mission to silence Altantuya. Azilah then roped in Sirul to do the job.
Between 10pm on Oct 18 and 1am on Oct 19, 2006, Altantuya was forcibly taken from outside Razak’s house, driven to a forest near Shah Alam, shot in the head and her body blown up with explosives.
Trying to keep the operation secret failed and Azilah and Sirul were charged with her murder and Razak with abetment of the murder.
The two ex-police officers were found guilty but Razak was acquitted by the High Court in 2009 without his defence being called.
Throughout the whole trial, the motive for the men to kill was never raised. This was very strange as they had never met Altantuya before and Sirul didn’t even know her name, assuming she was some “Chinese” woman.
Both men claimed innocence with Sirul saying he was the scapegoat during the trial, a claim he repeated in the Al-Jazeera interview.
But they were members of the secretive and elite Special Action Unit or Unit Tindakan Khas (UTK), and their duties included guarding VVIPs, like Najib.
An off-hand revelation that has long bugged me but was never investigated was Razak’s written statement submitted in a pre-trial hearing that stated that one of the commandos had bragged of personally killing "between six and 10 people”.
Not only that, Mastor Mohamad Ariff, the UTK’s deputy commander, told the court that his men were trained never to question orders from their superiors.
Mystery surrounding the case
What happened to the late Perumal Balasubramaniam, or PI Bala as he came to be known, the private investigator who was hired by Razak is also a source of endless speculation.
Among others, how Balasubramaniam was forced to recant a statutory declaration (SD) implicating Najib, his sudden relocation to India funded by Deepak Jaikishan, a close friend of Najib’s wife Rosmah Mansor, and his fatal heart attack just weeks after declaring that his first SD was correct upon his return from India.
Another puzzle is why Musa, Najib’s aide-de-camp, was never called to the stand during the trial, neither by the prosecution nor the defence.
With so many unanswered questions, there have been calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the murder. But there was no chance of it when Najib was in power.
After BN lost in the 2018 general election, there were high expectations that the Pakatan Harapan government would reopen the case but nothing came of it even after Azilah’s widely reported claim in an SD in 2019 admitting that the murder was on the order of Najib to “shoot-to-kill” Altantuya because she was a “foreign spy” and national security threat.
Sirul reinforced this claim when he told Al-Jazeera that “Azilah told me this is work, a special operation for (the) deputy prime minister at that time, Najib” and that he just obeyed Azilah who was his superior.
Sirul also revealed he was paid RM1 million from sources unknown to him for his silence on the murder during his detention in Australia.
In the past, Sirul could not be extradited to Malaysia because of Australia's policy of not deporting anyone with the death penalty over their heads.
Now that Parliament has removed the mandatory death penalty provision, it opens the way for Malaysia to repatriate Sirul.
Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail was supposed to issue a statement on the matter a fortnight ago but that did not happen.
The latest update from Bukit Aman CID chief Shuhaily Mohd Zain is that Sirul’s extradition is beyond the police and under the Attorney-General’s Chambers now.
Sirul had tried several times to offer to testify in exchange for a pardon and Azilah, who has been languishing on death row, tried to secure a new trial for himself in 2019.
Sirul also made an emotional appeal to be allowed to live as a free man with his son in Canberra because he is not a bad person and he would be in danger if he was forced to return to Malaysia.
And I find this and his apology to Altantuya’s family nauseating, hollow and self-serving.
RCI needed
He and Azilah may have both named the person who allegedly made the order to kill Altantuya but will anything come of it? I won’t hold my breath because nothing happened back in 2019 with Azilah’s explosive SD.
Perhaps, a real investigation or royal commission of inquiry will open a hornet’s nest that would sting too many people.
The two may have shifted the blame but make no mistake, they are trained merciless killers who cannot be pardoned. They murdered a defenceless young woman they did not know based on orders from higher-ups as if such orders were not unusual.
Although their SDs were made years apart - Sirul in 2006 and Azilah in 2019 - the details match up. Sirul’s blow-by-blow account of the murder and what he did after makes my blood run cold.
He described how Altantuya pleaded for her life, saying she was pregnant but Azilah wrestled her to the ground, knocking her unconscious. Sirul then shot her on the left side of her head.
They later stripped her and when they noticed her moving, Sirul shot her again.
He lifted Altantuya by the arms and Azilah her legs to move her into the forest where they attached the explosives to her body. After detonating the explosives, they drove to Bukit Aman.
Do you want Sirul amongst you, Aussies?
“Azilah and I arrived at Bukit Aman at approximately 12 midnight. At the UTK office, Azilah handed me about RM430. After that, I had a bath, changed clothes and put the clothes that I wore during the incident together with the victim's clothes into a plastic bag.
“I drove the jeep out of Bukit Aman and headed towards my house in Kota Damansara. Along the way, I threw out the victim's and my clothes.
“I arrived at home at about 1am, laid down to rest and slept.”
And he slept … as if it was the end of just another working day.
Food for thought, Australians. Do you really want such a man in your midst or should he be deported to Malaysia to serve the rest of his life in prison with Azilah? - Mkini
JUNE HL WONG is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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