AG’s aide challenged to prove that SR lied

Clare Rewcastle-Brown says she has evidence that Mabel Muttiah wrote the text messages she quoted in a report about the 'bullying and bribing' of Kevin Morais' family.

PETALING JAYA: Sarawak Report (SR) has challenged Mabel Muttiah of the Attorney-General’s Chambers to deny that she was the author of the text messages it quoted last Sunday in a report alleging foul play in the investigation into the murder of Deputy Public Public Prosecutor Kevin Morais.

“What exactly was a ‘lie’ in my article?” SR editor Clare Rewcastle-Brown said in response to Muttiah’s dismissal of the report as a “pack of lies.”

Muttiah, who is Special Assistant to the Attorney-General, on Monday denied that there was any truth in the SR article, which alleged that there were attempts to “bully and then bribe” Morais’ family to enable the cremation of the DPP’s body before a second autopsy could be performed.

Muttiah told FMT that the so-called “expose” was an example of “substandard reporting.”

FMT has been informed that she lodged a police report against SR on Tuesday.

Clare responded to Muttiah’s denial in an e-mail to FMT, in which she accused the AG’s aide of making vague statements.

“Is she claiming she did not author the various texts I quoted?” Clare asked. “If so, she should come out and say that rather than make vague claims about ‘packs of lies.’

“If she did write them (and I have evidence she did), then I was entitled to ask why was she pressuring the family in this way and why was her office offering money to the brothers of the deceased.

“And why was she engaging by text with a self-confessed ‘hardcore gangster’ to remove the body from the morgue without the consent of the rest of the family?”

The “hardcore gangster” Brown was referring to is Morais’ estranged brother who, according to SR, had whisked away and cremated Kevin’s body against the wishes of most of his family members.

Muttiah, in her statement on Monday, said SR did not contact her to verify the information it had before publishing it.

To this Brown said, “Her ‘right’ to be approached first for her side of the story is not a right that has been accorded to me by great swathes of the official Malaysian media, which have sought to vilify me on numerous occasions without making the slightest attempt to ever get my ‘side of the story.’

“Does she expect me to abide by rules that the state controlled Malaysian media do not bother to abide by themselves?

“I would be interested to see a copy of her police report, since maybe this might contain the details of what she alleges are ‘lies.’”