As GE14 looms, Warisan hounds gov't over Pairin report

Sabah's permanent committee on the state's illegal immigration problem has been criticised for failing to produce its report that was supposed to detail solutions to the problem.

Parti Warisan Sabah deputy president Darell Leiking said the report was more crucial now, following reports that some suspected foreign criminals had entered Sabah and were later nabbed in Peninsular Malaysia.

"To make things worse, some of them are already inside our security and defence agencies, such as the People's Volunteer Corps (Rela).

"The voter list, which has been being tainted with individuals, presumably non-Malaysian citizens, who shared the same identity card numbers with genuine Sabahans or Malaysians, also remained unresolved to date," Leiking said in a statement today.

In 2014, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Sabah's problems with illegal immigration found that a syndicate involving civil servants had illegally granted citizenship to foreigners in large numbers.

Following this, Putrajaya established a permanent committee, headed by Parti Bersatu Sabah chief Joseph Pairin Kitingan, to establish solutions to the problem.

'Make the report public soon'

Pairin had promised that the report would be ready by the end of 2015.

Leiking said Pairin's committee should make its report public soon, to avoid the matter becoming an election issue for the opposition.

He said the report must be handed to Putrajaya in order to formulate a permanent solution.

In the absence of a report and Putrajaya's inability to recall all MyKads in Sabah with the purpose of reissuing new cards to bona fide Sabahans, Leiking urged Putrajaya to consider the proposal for the Sabah government to issue its own identity card - the Sabah ID.

"The issuance of our own Sabah ID that will be a co-existing document to the existing MyKads," he explained.

Earlier this month, the authorities arrested eight members over alleged links with the Southern Philippines terror group Abu Sayaff in Kuala Lumpur.

Of the eight, six were allegedly Malaysians of Filipino descent from Sabah.

In June, the police also claimed that they arrested three suspected militants in Sandakan, Sabah, while they were en route to Southern Philippines. - Mkini