Escaped policeman not right man for the job at skirmish area, court told
A Bukit Aman Special Branch ( SB) personnel who escaped from an ambush at Kampung Sri Jaya in Simunul, Semporna last year would not have been the right person to guide his team into the water village, a rescue team leader told the High Court here yesterday.
DSP Hisham Mahmood explained that the SB personnel, Sergeant Major Zamari Suhot neither hailed from Simunul nor was attached to Semporna police headquarters.
Hisham was responding to a question by counsel Datuk N Sivananthan on why a police volunteer constable SP Thanyman Antonysamy guided the rescue team to the skirmish location at Kampung Sri Jaya on March 3 last year to rescue security personnel trapped in the village since launching a raid the previous night to arrest a suspect linked to the Lahad Datu intrusion.
Sivananthan: You said Constable SP Thanyman came with you in a helicopter to show you the village where the skirmish occurred. Was he part of the operation (raid)? Hisham: I don’t know. Sivananthan: Did you ask him how was it that he ( Thanyman) knew the location of the incident?
Hisham: I didn’t ask. But what was described during a briefing, the location of the incident was near a surau and there was a purple-coloured house.
Sivananthan: What precisely was Thanyman’s role in the helicopter?
Hisham: He was assigned to point to the direction of the location of the surau and the purple-coloured house.
Earlier, Hisham identified several clothes seized by the police forensics team from the skirmish area at the water village on March 9, last year.
Among the clothes showed to him by the forensics team were a camouf lage uniform, a pair of camouf lage trousers with a black belt attached to the waist, a black T- shirt which bore the words ‘RAF’ and the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic characters on the left chest, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of black track suit trousers and a few white T- shirts with Arabic words.
Thirty accused, comprising 27 Filipinos and three local residents, are being tried in the case, in which some are facing multiple charges of being members of a terrorist group or waging war against the Yang di- Pertuan Agong, recruiting members for a terrorist group or willfully harbouring individuals they knew to be members of a terrorist group.
They allegedly committed the offences between Feb 12 and April 10 last year.
The hearing before Justice Stephen Chung at the Sabah Prisons Department continues today. — Bernama