He said many countries declassified documents that were classified or under the Official Secrets Act after 25, 35, or more years depending on the sensitivity of those documents while some, of course, remained classified forever.

“Actually the BMF report is just two pages of 13 million pages that the CIA declassified and is purely coincidental.

“The CIA did not declassify just these two pages regarding the BMF issue alone,” he said in his blog at http://sskeruak.blogspot.my/, today.

According to Salleh, the former prime minister had said that the recently released CIA report implicating him in the 1983 multi-billion BMF scandal was meant to demonise him and the reason behind this was because Mahathir often criticised the United States (US).

“If that is true why did the CIA wait 34 years to do this? They would have done it when he was still prime minister and not now when he is no longer important to the US,” Salleh added.