The inquiry, which began last April 17, is in recess and will resume on May 7.
Corporal Mat Ten, a Senoi Praak General Operations Forces (GOF) officer, was the first person to testify. He said he noticed a suspicious trail leading up the Wang Burma hill when he was making one of his rounds in his first week of working in the area.
He told the second witness, Sergeant Yusoff Islam Hassan, about it and they decided to investigate. They climbed up the trail for hours before finding what appeared to be a settlement that had plenty of tents and some wooden towers that looked liked observation posts. This was on Jan 18, 2015, the inquiry was told.
On Jan 19, third witness Inspector Mohd Mossadique Azni, who headed a GOF post in Padang Besar, led a 10-member team up the hill. The team, which included Mat Ten and Yusoff, found, in addition to the tents and towers, locked containment areas in which people were confined. They looked like foreign nationals.
At the top of the towers, the team saw a number of individuals who appeared to be on guard duty.
Mat said he saw one of them, a woman who was probably Thai, receiving a notification on her mobile phone and then quickly standing up to yell, “Police!” All the guards scrambled away into the jungle, breaking a few of the wooden structures.
The surveillance operation turned into a raid when other people in the camp scattered in panic. The team caught six of them.
That evening, 38 illegal immigrants were detained in an operation mounted by three teams, one of which was led by Mossadique. The joint operation was orchestrated by ASP Joeking Marian Anthony, another witness.
Mat Ten said he gave to Mossadique several items he had found – a notebook with Thai writings, a Thai driver’s license, a mobile phone, three SIM cards, a DVD and a few CDs.
These pieces of evidence apparently aided the Special Branch at the Padang Besar police headquarters in the discovery of similar camps in Genting Perah and the Perlis National Park areas near Wang Burma hill.
Another witness, Wan Ahmad Hamirudeen Ahmad, the coordinating officer of a division within the Perlis state police headquarters, said the notebook that Mat Ten found contained a list of names, telephone numbers and bank account numbers, one of which was traced to a Malaysian individual.
Joeking, who was the commander of a company in GOF’s Battalion 3, said he found burial sites near the Wang Burma camp on Jan 21, after he was told by ASP Muhd Zukir Mohd Isa, then the deputy police chief of Perlis, to destroy the camp to prevent other illegal immigrants from using it.
But Zukir told the inquiry he had instructed only a partial demolition to make the area unfit to live in.
He also said he recalled Joeking briefing him about grave-like structures near the camp at a monthly meeting on Jan 20. But Joeking said he gave no such briefing before Jan 21.
The inquiry revealed inefficiencies in the police force, at least according to one of the commissioners, former inspector-general of police Norian Mai, when he commented on the alleged reluctance of experienced officers to investigate the case.
Junaidy Md Saad, who was the acting head of the Criminal Investigation Department in Padang Besar, testified that he ceased investigations between Jan 24 and March 5 to wait for further instructions.
He said it was on Jan 23 that he climbed up the Wang Burma hill to collect intelligence and to look around for graves under the instruction of the district police chief. He passed the information to his superior but did not investigate.
On Mar 6, he was told to climb the hill with a forensic team to dig up one of the graves and they confirmed the presence of a body. He said his superior told him to stop investigating pending further instructions from Bukit Aman.
He told the inquiry there was no official order from higher up for him to stop investigating but he felt unqualified to take any action despite his 12 years of experience as an investigator.
The inquiry was also told of authorities at Bukit Aman being slow to give instructions. Former Perlis police chief Zul Aznam Haron said the inspector-general of police (IGP) at the time, Khalid Abu Bakar, told him to “hold on” and added that this applied to all aspects of the investigation into the discovery of the camps and graves.
Last Thursday, an officer admitted to the RCI that he lodged a false police report about a group of undocumented migrants detained in the Genting Perah area near Wang Burma hill.
Inspector Husyairi Muhd Musa, the 18th witness, was with the operations intelligence department at the Padang Besar district police headquarters. He said one of his superiors, whom he referred to as “Rizani”, told him to collect a group of five illegal immigrants arrested by the Special Branch at a spot near the Perlis National Park.
He drove there in a van and was met by a group of Special Branch members, who handed over the immigrants to him. He could not identify any of the Special Branch men.
He said Rizani ordered him to draft a false police report saying he had arrested the individuals himself after stumbling upon them during one of his rounds.
Former chief justice Arifin Zakaria is leading the inquiry. Other panel members, besides Norian, are Noorbahri Baharuddin, Razali Ismail, Junaidah Abd Rahman, Nazirah Hussain and Tan Seng Giaw. Yusran Shah Yusof is the secretary of the RCI.