A witness to the 2017 enforced disappearance of Pastor Raymond Koh testified before the civil court that he has no idea whether the abductors were agents of the police.
Roeshan Celestine Gomez said the black SUVs and five masked men clad in black military attire who took Koh (above) had no police logo on them during the one-minute incident at Petaling Jaya, Selangor.
Roeshan, a witness for Koh’s family, who is also a lawyer, said this during today’s full trial before the High Court in Kuala Lumpur on the family’s lawsuit against the government and police.
He made this concession while being cross-examined by senior federal counsel (SFC) Nurul Farhana Khalid, who acted for the government and police.
Nurul Farhana: The SUVs got no police logo?
Roeshan: I do not recollect.
Nurul Farhana: Were they agents of the police?
Roeshan: I have no way of knowing.
The witness also told the civil court he could not recollect any logo being present on the uniform of the five masked men.
Yesterday, during the first-day trial of the civil action before judicial commissioner Su Tiang Joo, the witness testified that four black SUVs and several other vehicles surrounded Koh’s car in the whole operation that was “professionally done”.
Koh’s family is suing the government and police to compel them to reveal his whereabouts since being abducted from his car at Petaling Jaya around 10.45am on Feb 13, 2017.
During open-court proceedings today, while replying to Nurul Farhana, Roeshan said he could not confirm whether the five men - who alighted from the SUVs - were clad in actual military outfits, explaining that he was assuming so due to them not being normally attired.
The SFC also pointed out that Roeshan’s initial police report made at the Kelana Jaya police station around an hour after the incident did not contain as much detail as his testimony before this civil court as well as before the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) over the incident, to which he agreed.
Nurul Farhana then put to Roeshan that he never saw the alleged abduction and that his whole testimony before the civil court was influenced by his seeing a viral video of the abduction, to which he disagreed.
She was referring to the police report not containing details such as the name of Roeshan’s friend who was allegedly with him during the incident as well as the detail that the five masked men were wearing military-style outfits.
Roeshan disagreed with her contention that he could not see what was really happening at the scene as his testimony yesterday stated he was around 30-40m from the incident at the time.
The witness also disagreed with her contention that he arrived much later after the alleged incident and did not really see what happened, due to the 2017 viral video on the abduction not showing his car in the video frame.
Testing witness credibility
After around two hours of cross-examination, counsel Jerald Gomez - who acted for the plaintiff, Koh’s wife Susanna Liew - objected to Nurul Farhana’s line of questioning as it only seemed to be testing Roeshan’s memory and was quite protracted.
The SFC then explained to the civil court judge that she needed to maintain her line of cross-examination as Roeshan is an important eyewitness and that she had to test his credibility.
Proceedings before Su will resume on June 20.
During the Suhakam inquiry into Koh’s disappearance on Oct 19 2017, Roeshan testified that the investigating officer (IO) in the case described the abduction as “looked very much like the modus operandi of a police operation”.
The lawyer then was describing what the IO allegedly told him after he lodged the police report.
On April 3, 2019, Suhakam concluded that Koh’s abduction was an enforced disappearance that involved the Special Branch (SB) from the police federal headquarters in Bukit Aman, Kuala Lumpur.
A year later, before the civil court, Liew filed the writ of summons against the police to compel the authorities to reveal Koh’s whereabouts.
Besides Koh, Suhakam also ruled that activist Amri Che Mat was a victim of enforced disappearance involving the SB and the police force.
Amri was abducted sometime around midnight on Nov 24, 2016.
In November 2019, Amri’s wife Norhayati filed a suit against 21 defendants in relation to her husband’s disappearance, including some of the same defendants named in Liew’s suit. - Mkini
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