KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Malaysian police visited former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s house late Wednesday, reportedly searching for documents as part of a renewed probe into a massive corruption scandal involving a state investment fund that is being investigated abroad.
More than a dozen police vehicles arrived at Najib’s house shortly after he returned home from prayers at a nearby mosque, fueling speculation that he may be arrested after new Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned that he could be charged soon over the 1MDB fund fiasco.
Commercial crime director Amar Singh Ishar Singh told local media that police were searching for evidence in an ongoing probe and that it was being carried out at five locations belonging to or linked to Najib. He declined to give details. Police officials couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
The national Bernama news agency cited sources as saying that the police were searching for documents related to 1MDB and that raids occurred simultaneously at the prime minister’s office, the prime minister’s official residence and an upscale condominium in the city.
Mahathir has not yet moved into the prime minister’s office or residence. He reopened a probe into the 1MDB scandal after his alliance won a stunning election victory last week, ousting Najib and ending the National Front’s 60-year grip on power. Najib started the fund in 2009 and US investigators say at least $4.5 billion was stolen and laundered by Najib’s associates, some of which landed in his bank account.
Earlier Wednesday, Mahathir said the government will make arrests as soon as there is clear evidence and reiterated that there will be “no deal” for Najib in the scandal.
Mahathir, 92, said an initial investigation showed the scale of wrongdoing by Najib’s administration was more serious than expected.
Mahathir said he has met with ousted Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail, who said he had been preparing to file criminal charges against Najib when he was abruptly removed in 2015. Gani led an investigation by multiple agencies into the scandal at the time, which was later closed after Najib was cleared of wrongdoing.
Mahathir said the government will seek to retrieve billions of dollars laundered from 1MDB to repay government debts that have piled up over the years.
“The focus on corruption is important because we need to get back money which is still in Switzerland, the US, Singapore and maybe Luxembourg. For this, we will contact the governments of the countries to recover the money there,” Mahathir said.
“The money belongs to Malaysia and it came from 1MDB. We will appeal for the money to be returned to Malaysia.”
He said the government is also committed to repaying any debts linked to the fund that it has guaranteed.
Najib and his wife have been barred from leaving Malaysia. The government has also told the current attorney general, who cleared Najib of wrongdoing in 2016, to go on leave, and has relieved the country’s treasury chief, who is also the 1MDB chairman, of his duties.
Mahathir, who was prime minister for 22 years until in 2003, emerged from retirement to join hands with former political foes to oust Najib amid anger over the 1MDB scandal. He said his new government is also seeking to cut wastage in the government, including possibly axing 17,000 political appointees.
The finance ministry said in a statement Wednesday that a 6 percent goods and services tax introduced by Najib in 2016 to boost government revenues will be abolished June 1. The tax has been blamed for raising the cost of living and has angered many Malaysians.
After being sworn in as Malaysia’s seventh prime minister last Thursday, Mahathir moved swiftly to name new finance, home affairs and defense ministers but has not appointed a full Cabinet amid horse trading among his four-party alliance for posts. He said he hoped this week to have a 10-member Cabinet before expanding it later but acknowledged it was a challenge navigating his alliance.
“It is difficult. It is time consuming and energy consuming and I don’t get much sleep but I have to do it because they appointed me as prime minister. I cannot complain very much,” he said.
Malaysian police raid ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak’s house
Malaysian police raid ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak’s house
- More than a dozen police vehicles arrived at Najib’s house shortly after he returned home from prayers at a nearby mosque
- Mahathir has reopened a probe into the 1MDB scandal after his alliance won a stunning election victory last week, ousting Najib and ending the National Front’s 60-year grip on power
Moscow mayor says air defenses repel drone attacks aimed at capital
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Friday that air defense units had repelled two attacks by drones headed for the capital.
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said air defense units southeast of the capital had repelled one group of drones, without specifying how many were involved. He said a separate group of two drones had been downed by air defenses south of Moscow.
Sobyanin said there had been no casualties or damage at the site of the incident southeast of the city. Specialist crews had been dispatched to both areas.
Trump pardons 23 anti-abortion protesters
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed pardons Thursday for 23 anti-abortion protesters whom the White House said were prosecuted under his predecessor Joe Biden’s administration.
“They should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office the day before a major anti-abortion march in Washington.
“This is a great honor to sign this.”
An aide at the ceremony said the pardoned people were “peaceful pro-life protesters” but the White House did not immediately release more details on them.
US media said the protesters were convicted of blocking access to abortion clinics.
Republican Trump is reportedly due to address the “March for Life” in Washington on Friday by video, while Vice President JD Vance is set to appear in person.
Trump has recently kept his position on the politically explosive issue of abortion deliberately vague.
While the US Christian right has called for federal restrictions on the practice, Trump has said he wants to leave the issue to individual US states to decide.
But he has repeatedly claimed credit for the 2022 ruling by the US Supreme Court — conservative-dominated thanks to justices appointed during his first term — that overturned the nationwide federal right to abortion.
Since the Supreme Court ruling, at least 20 US states have brought in full or partial restrictions on abortion.
Trump has reached out to his base with a series of pardons since starting his second presidential term on Monday.
Within hours of his inauguration, he pardoned some 1,500 people accused of involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters trying to overturn his election loss to Biden.
Trump then on Wednesday pardoned two police officers who were convicted over the death of a 20-year-old Black man in a car chase in Washington in 2020.
Man jailed for knife attack aimed at French magazine Charlie Hebdo
- The killings in January 2015 shocked France and triggered a fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion
PARIS: A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in jail for attempting to murder two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020 with a meat cleaver.
When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which was targeted by Islamists a decade ago for publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
In fact, Charlie Hebdo had moved in the wake of the storming of its offices by two Al-Qaeda-linked masked gunmen, who killed 12 people including eight of the paper’s editorial staff.
The killings in January 2015 shocked France and triggered a fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion, fueling an outpouring of sympathy in France expressed in a wave of “Je Suis Charlie” (“I Am Charlie“) solidarity.
Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived in France illegally in the summer of 2019.
The court had earlier heard how Mahmood was influenced by radical Pakistani preacher Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who had called for the beheading of blasphemers.
Mahmood was convicted of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy and he will be banned from France when his sentence is served.
The 2015 bloodshed, which included a separate but linked hostage-taking that claimed another four lives at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, marked the start of a dark period for France.
In the years that followed extremists inspired by Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group repeatedly mounted attacks, setting the country on edge and inflaming religious tensions.
To mark the opening of the trial into the 2015 massacre, Charlie Hebdo republished its cartoons of Mohammed on September 2, 2020.
Later that month, urged by the extremist preacher to “avenge the Prophet,” Mahmood arrived in front of Charlie Hebdo’s former address.
Armed with a butcher’s cleaver, he gravely wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency.
Throughout the trial, his defense argued that his actions were the result of a profound disconnect he felt from France, given his upbringing in the fervently Muslim Pakistan countryside.
“In his head he had never left Pakistan,” Mahmood’s defense lawyer Alberic de Gayardon said on Wednesday, conceding that “each of his blows aimed to kill.”
“He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis,” Gayardon added.
Charlie Hebdo’s decision in 2020 to republish the Mohammed lampoons triggered a wave of angry demonstrations in Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death.
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time, were on trial alongside Mahmood on terrorist conspiracy charges for having supported and encouraged his actions.
The French capital’s special court for minors handed Mahmood’s co-defendants sentences of between three and 12 years.
None of the six in the dock reacted to the verdict.
Both victims were present at the sentencing, but did not wish to comment on the trial’s outcome.
Earlier in the trial one of the two, alias Paul, told the court of the long rehabilitation he undertook after his near-death experience.
“It broke something within me,” the 37-year-old said.
Neither he nor the other victim, named only as Helene, 32, have accepted Mahmood’s pleas for forgiveness.
Mahmood’s lawyers have yet to indicate whether their client will appeal the verdict.
Trump declassifies JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr assassination files
- The National Archives has released tens of thousands of records in recent years related to the November 22, 1963 assassination of president Kennedy
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday declassifying files on the 1960s assassinations of president John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
“A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters as he signed the order in the Oval Office of the White House. “Everything will be revealed.”
After signing the order, Trump passed the pen he used to an aide, saying “Give that to RFK Jr,” the president’s nominee to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The National Archives has released tens of thousands of records in recent years related to the November 22, 1963 assassination of president Kennedy but held thousands back, citing national security concerns.
It said at the time of the latest release, in December 2022, that 97 percent of the Kennedy records — which total approximately five million pages — had now been made public.
The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president determined that it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.
That formal conclusion has done little, however, to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files has added fuel to various conspiracy theories.
President Joe Biden said at the time of the December 2022 release that a “limited” number of documents would continue to be held back at the request of unspecified “agencies.”
Previous requests to withhold documents have come from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thousands of Kennedy assassination-related documents from the National Archives were released during Trump’s first term in office, but he also held some back on national security grounds.
Kennedy scholars have said the documents still held by the archives are unlikely to contain any bombshell revelations or put to rest the rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination of the 35th US president.
Oswald was shot to death two days after killing Kennedy by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as he was being transferred from the city jail.
Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK” have fueled the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson.
President Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert, a former attorney general, was assassinated in June 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born Jordanian, was convicted of his murder and is serving a life sentence in a prison in California.
Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison in 1998 but King’s children have expressed doubts in the past that Ray was the assassin.
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Croatia issues Serbia travel warning after saying nationals expelled
- The Croatian foreign ministry alleged “inappropriate and unfounded actions of Serbian authorities toward Croatian nationals“
- Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman on Wednesday said he would send a protest note to Serbia
ZAGREB: Croatia on Thursday recommended its nationals postpone non-essential travel to Serbia, alleging Belgrade had expelled five Croatian women citing security reasons.
The Croatian foreign ministry alleged “inappropriate and unfounded actions of Serbian authorities toward Croatian nationals,” in a statement.
Other Croatians had previously been accused of taking part in a recent wave of protests against Serbia’s nationalist government in an separate case.
Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman on Wednesday said he would send a protest note to Serbia over the “detention of five Croatian women” there who all returned home safely.
He said the five attended a workshop involving NGOs organized by Austria’s Erste Bank foundation and were “detained without any explanation.”
He said Zagreb will inform the European Union delegation in Belgrade about Serbian authorities’ actions, “which put Croatian citizens in a humiliating position.”
Serbia’s foreign ministry said it was “inappropriate” for a Croatian official to “accuse Serbia of endangering the freedom of movement and speech of several Croatian nationals.”
The latter were “treated in Belgrade by the competent state bodies in line with legal procedures and usual international practice,” it said in a statement without elaborating.
Serbia’s interior ministry did not reply to AFP’s request for comment.
Ana Kovacic, an art historian from Zagreb who took part in the two-day workshop, told the newspaper Jutarnji list that it was attended by around 15 people from Bosnia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia.
After it ended, the participants were taken from their hotel to a police station where they were interrogated, she said.
They were given a document to sign saying that they were “threatening the security of the Republic of Serbia,” should leave the country within 24 hours and were banned from entering it for a year.
Croatian and Serbian human rights groups condemned the actions of the Serbian police, who they said “arrested and deported several persons” from those countries, describing those arrested as “activists.”
Two workshop participants from Albania also told local media in their country that they suffered the same treatment.
The Albanian foreign ministry said on Thursday it had summoned the Serbian ambassador over the case.
It “expressed regret and serious concerns regarding the detention” of the two, describing them as “representatives of civil society who participated in a seminar in Belgrade.”
Serbia has been rocked by regular protests since a deadly disaster at a train station in November ignited longstanding anger over corruption.
High-ranking Serbian government officials, without providing evidence, have claimed in their statements that the student blockades and protests are “influenced by Western intelligence agencies” with the aim of “overthrowing President Aleksandar Vucic.”
At the end of December, tabloid media close to the Serbian authorities accused a group of Croatian students of participating in the protests.
Ties between two former Yugoslav republics remain frosty since Croatia’s 1990s war of independence against Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs.
