“If he (Nur Jazlan) is not well-versed in the law, then seek advice from his officers or his own lawyer. Don’t come out making statements to scare the public.
“Making statements against the government is never a crime.
“It is only a crime when the government itself wrongfully abuses its power to effectively defraud society,” Mohamed Haniff Kathri Abdulla told FMT.
Haniff was responding to an earlier report by Malaysiakini, quoting Nur Jazlan as vaguely saying “who says we are not investigating Mahathir under Section 124(c). Whether or not we want to take this to the next stage is a different matter”.
This came after several individuals and organisations, including Lawyers for Liberty, the Bar Council, Bersih 2.0 and Malaysiakini, are being investigated by the authorities under Section 124(c) of the Penal Code for allegedly attempting to undermine parliamentary democracy.
When asked if Mahathir is currently being probed under Section 124C, Haniff said he had not received any details on the ongoing investigation yet.
“As far as we are concerned, there is no specific information on which section Dr M is being investigated under.”
Recently, local authorities have decided to open investigations after US website DC Leaks published a leaked document outlining plans by a foreign group intent on meddling in Malaysian politics through a programme called the “Malaysia Program”.
The document is of leaked minutes of a meeting, allegedly involving members from the George Soros-linked Open Society Foundations (OSF).
The minutes revealed that OSF started working on the 13th general election (GE13) in 2010, initially anticipating that it would be held in 2011, two years after Prime Minister Najib Razak took over the nation’s top post.
Over the years, Soros has been linked to pro-democracy activities in Eastern Europe and has also been accused of being involved in currency manipulation.
Soros became a household name in Malaysia in the late 1990s when Mahathir, the then prime minister, accused him of engineering the 1997 Asian financial crisis.