Police yet to identify suspects in Seafield temple rioting

INQUEST | The police are still attempting to identify suspects who broke the windshield of the fire truck on Nov 27 near the Seafield Maha Mariamman Temple in Subang Jaya.

"So far, we still haven’t managed to identify the main suspects, like those who broke the windshield of the fire truck.

"We are still in the process of gathering intelligence to identify them,” said police senior investigating officer Lew Keng Joe (above) in the coroner’s court in Shah Alam today.

Today is the 22nd day of the inquest into the death of firefighter Muhammad Adib Mohd Kassim.

Earlier in the inquest today, conducting officer Faten Hadni Khairuddin showed the court a number of videos, including CCTV footage and videos of the riot as recorded by the 22nd witness Hardeep Singh, which went viral.

Faten asked Lew whether the authorities could see the suspects’ faces in Hardeep’s videos, one of which depicted a group of people attacking the fire truck.

"We can, but the pictures become pixelated when the forensics laboratory tried to enhance them, so it is difficult to identify,” Lew testifies before coroner Rofiah Mohamad.

He exlained that he initially sent to the forensics laboratory copies of the video he took off YouTube after it went viral.

However, the quality of the video was poor as it was just a copy from the Internet, and the pictures extracted from the video were too pixelated to identify much, he said.

As such, he called Hardeep in to extract the original video from his phone on March 26. The extraction process took six and a half hours.

In the early hours of Nov 26, a group of thugs, allegedly hired by the developer who owns the land on which the Seafield temple sits, had tried to take control of the building.

This led to a clash with Hindu devotees that escalated into rioting. The developer has denied hiring thugs.

The following day, tens of thousands of supporters gathered near the temple in a show of support, but a second round of rioting broke out.

Adib was part of a Fire and Rescue Department team that tried to put out vehicles that were set ablaze by rioters. - Mkini