The Malaysian Insight

FORMER prime minister Najib Razak will apply to be an intervenor in an application for a retrial of the murder of Mongolian interpreter Altantuya Shaariibuu.

The review application was filed by former commando Azilah Hadri, whom the Federal Court has convicted of killing the woman, and who has now named Najib as the direct mastermind of her murder.

Azilah’s lawyer filed an application for a retrial, and another to overturn his conviction, at the Federal Court today. 

Najib’s lead counsel Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, said his client had a direct interest in the review application.

“You cannot make condemnations against anybody without that person be given the right to answer in court. 

“He has totally denied everything that has been alleged. This allegation is raised for the first time after 10 years. This is an allegation made at the 11th hour when Azilah is expected to be executed. 

“My client is being targeted in a way… so that he can be arrested and put into prison without bail,” Shafee told reporters outside court today.

Azilah, who is on death row in Kajang Prison, said in a statutory declaration dated October 17 this year, that he was directly ordered by Najib on October 17, 2006, to kill Altantuya because she was a “dangerous foreign spy”. 

Azilah also said Najib’s close associate, Abdul Razak Baginda, who was also known as the then deputy prime minister’s special officer, repeated the instructions to kill Altantuya, and confirmed with him that the order had come from Najib.

Razak, who was initially charged with abetting the murder, was later acquitted, while Azilah and fellow commando Sirul Azhar Umar were convicted of murdering Altantuya by the High Court in 2009. 

They were sentenced to death by the apex court in 2015. Sirul has escaped to Australia, where he is held in a detention centre.

Shafee today described the document’s contents as “unbelievable”.

“The death sentence has been handed down for several years now. I can’t blame him (Azilah). It’s a desperate application to save his life. But what I can blame him for is that he is implicating my client and one other person when there has not been a shred of evidence in the past 10 years.

“When I read some of these facts, I thought it was laughable, that my client, a former deputy prime minister and a former prime minister could tell Azilah, ‘Not only should you arrest this woman but kill her’… and my client apparently did this (makes slit the throat gesture). It is completely laughable. It is unbelievable, as unbelievable as claiming a cow jumping over the moon,” Shafee said.

The lawyer claimed that Najib’s other trials for corruption involving SRC International and 1Malaysia Development Bhd were not moving fast enough and that some people were eager to see Najib in jail.

“This is another attempt (to put Najib in jail). They are desperate to put my client in jail now that he is very popular,” Shafee said.

He also claimed that he was told that Azilah had met “a VVIP outside of the prison in February this year”. 

However, Shafee is yet unable to confirm this. – December 17, 2019.