By IANS
Kuala Lumpur : The Malaysian police have slapped a second sedition charge on P. Uthayakumar, legal advisor of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) and the man behind a rally of Indian immigrants on Nov 25, and have detained one more activist for participating in the illegal gathering.
There was a 15-minute commotion outside the Jalan Duta Court Complex Tuesday after about 100 Hindraf supporters and police clashed when the lawyer was arrested at about 5 p.m., the New Straits Times reported Wednesday.
“The police officer did not provide grounds of the arrest,” Uthayakumar’s counsel M. Manoharan said.
This is the second time he has been charged with sedition but Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail, who led the prosecution team, said there was “more to come”, the newspaper said.
Uthayakumar was earlier arrested on a sedition charge at the Bangsar Shopping Centre at 9.20 a.m. but was later let off.
While the first sedition charge centred on what he had said in a speech in Tamil to a crowd at a restaurant in Batang Berjuntai, the second is over an alleged letter he posted on the Internet on Nov 15 that was addressed to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and claimed the Malaysian government was promoting “ethnic cleansing” of Indians.
In the letter, Uthayakumar alleged that a government-backed Islamic extremist terrorist group, which had launched a pre-dawn attack that destroyed the Kampung Jawa Mariamman Hindu temple, was persecuting Indians.
It also stated that Hindraf wanted Britain to move an emergency UN resolution condemning the “ethnic cleansing” in Malaysia and asked Brown to refer Malaysia to the International Criminal Court for crimes against its own ethnic minority.
“The accused is a lawyer and he should have known that the words he used in the letter were seditious,” the attorney general said.
Manoharan said the charge was baseless as there was no proof that Uthayakumar wrote the article that did not have a signature below it.
However, Judge Sabariah Othman Tuesday ruled that the charge was in order and there was no need for Uthayakumar’s signature to be evident below the alleged seditious article.
Uthayakumar is not new to controversy, the newspaper said, recalling that on May 20, 2004, he flew to Britain to seek temporary asylum, alleging that he was being threatened and intimidated by the police. He had also sought the help of several human rights organisations there.
On Tuesday, M. Selvanathan, 45, became the latest to be charged for alleged participation in the rally organised by Hindraf to voice the grievances of people of Tamil origin in Malaysia.
Thirty-one others associated with the rally are being persecuted on charges ranging from disturbing peace to attacking a policeman on duty with intent to murder, and have been denied bail.
Selvanathan has been charged with “displaying criminal force against policemen who were carrying out their official duties,” the Star newspaper reported Wednesday.
He has also been accused of being involved in a public assembly even after knowing that it had been declared illegal and asked to disperse.