RPK says will return if no ISA for him

Raja Petra has offered to return if Najib vows not to welcome him with the ISA.

Going to musicals, enjoying dinner with a group of Malaysian friends until 11pm, and speaking at public events.

Raja Petra Kamarudin, the controversial blogger that the Malaysian police claims it is actively hunting, hardly seems like a man in hiding.

Or, as many reports have put it, a fugitive.

It is a term he bristles at. He said detention without trial is the only thing stopping him from returning home to Malaysia.

“Why am I being called a fugitive, or runaway, or worse, that I absconded? Like I embezzled money and fled the country,” he told

The writer of the No Holds Barred column in web portal, Malaysia Today, insisted that since he is not convicted of any crime and nor were there any standing charges or arrest warrants, he cannot possibly be classified as a fugitive.

He also does not have to appear for the appeal against his release from the Internal Security Act (ISA), a law that allows for detention without trial at the prerogative of the home minister, a case which has seen no progress since Raja Petra left Malaysia in May 2009 .

However, critics point out that he was not in the country when an arrest warrant was issued after he failed to show up for the hearing on a criminal defamation charge last year, resulting in a discharge not amounting to an acquittal in November as the police failed to execute the warrant.

But the man known by his initials, RPK, claimed he left the country not because he wanted to flee charges of sedition and criminal defamation, but that his sources had informed him that a new ISA detention order was being prepared at the time.

“We were winning all the court cases. We were making the government look stupid. My lawyers to this day regret that we had to leave,” he said of the charges levelled at him due to his accusation that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and his wife, Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, were involved in the death of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shariibuu, and a related submarine deal that French authorities are now investigating for an alleged irregularity in commission payment, said to amount to a whopping RM500 million.

To back his claim, he issued an open offer to Najib to “guarantee me that I will not be placed under ISA and forget another six charges I know they were preparing, and I will come back and fight the sedition and criminal defamation cases.”

Raja Petra has spent the past few months calling what appears to be the government’s bluff. When police insisted they were still trying to track his whereabouts, he came out to speak in public in May, claiming the Barisan Nasional government knew all along as he had met various Umno figures in the United Kingdom over the past year.

He also told The Malaysian Insider in this interview that his lawyers have informed Scotland Yard that he was available to them anytime, and he has also challenged the government to attempt to extradite him.

Raja Petra was confident that it has not done so as such an attempt would, he claimed, play into his hands.

“With sedition and criminal defamation, the truth of the matter is not material, only whether the statement has caused hurt. But to extradite me, they have to establish dual criminality.”

His point was that a case in a UK court would be based on a different charge that would have to establish whether his allegations against Najib and Rosmah were true, as these two crimes — sedition and criminal defamation — have been abolished in the UK early this year.

But perhaps the one thing that irked him more than being called a fugitive is the idea that he has required funding during his stay in the UK, having left Malaysia over a year ago.

Both Najib and Datuk Mukhriz Mahathir, a deputy minister, have claimed that Raja Petra is not trustworthy as he is funded by the opposition.

“You think I pokai (penniless) ah? You don’t know how much property I own, or shares, or any of my financial background.

“Do you know how many public-listed companies I was director of in the 1980s?” he said as he laughed off the notion that he was bankrupt.

He explained that he was sent a letter giving him 14 days to contest his bankruptcy on April 14, 2001 but this was only three days into his 60-day stint under his first ISA detention.

“The man I was supposed to have guaranteed was Datuk Hamzah Zainuddin, who has accused Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim of harassing his wife. Why would I have guaranteed such a person?” he said, alleging a frame-up.

“But in any case, everyone knows you can put assets in your wife’s name or your daughter’s name.”

For now, he is happy to continue taunting Najib’s administration, and in his most recent column entry, he told the government to stop harassing other individuals with regards to funding him or another central figure in the Altantuya saga, the private investigator P. Balasubramaniam hired by Abdul Razak Baginda, a close associate of Najib’s who was being harassed by the Mongolian.

“Hey, no need to investigate the lawyers. The lawyers are not paying for private investigator P. Balasubramaniam’s expenses here in London... I just wanted it on record that Raja Petra Kamarudin is paying for Bala’s trip to London and Paris — so no need to harass anyone else,” he wrote.