DAILY DISPATCHES: The absurd conjectures & suppositions in Teoh Beng Hock’s death

2009/07/17

Azmi Anshar

THE MOST salient established fact surrounding Teoh Beng Hock is that he is dead, the tragic demise of a young man with the potential of a brilliant political future. Another established fact was that hours before his death, Teoh was intensively interviewed by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission over investigations into the alleged misuse of state allocations by Pakatan Rakyat assemblymen at the MACC Selangor headquarters in Plaza Masalam, Shah Alam.

Teoh’s timetable with the MACC is well produced - questioning from 5pm on Wednesday to 3.45am on Thursday and then a break at 6am before resumption of questioning at 8am. However, precious little is known from the time he took that 6am break to 1.45pm when his sprawled body was discovered. Hence, the conjectures and suppositions flew in like Molotov cocktails.

What is still being established is how and why, and to a certain extent, where the Seri Kembangan assemblyman Ean Yong Hian Wah’s political secretary died. How he died is now a subject of massive speculations germinating from a very imaginative public roiling in plausibility and probabilities, and aggravated by untrammelled anger, mounting disbelief and involuntary emotionalism, mostly from senior colleagues of Teoh’s DAP to automatically recriminate the MACC, the last people reported to have been in proximity with Teoh.

There are already reports that claimed that Teoh fell to his death although this has not been fully established, merely inference based on how the body was found at the 5th floor of an adjacent building and its consistencies with a fall next the building housing the MACC. There are unsubstantiated claims too that he was either pushed out of the MACC interrogation room on the 14th floor and that was how his body was found sprawled on the adjacent building.

After that came the counter-reports on why Teoh died: he committed suicide because he could not endure the intense questioning. There are also the sub-plots of his “suicide”: he was so full of remorse and could not face his colleagues because he had whistle-blown on everyone involved.

Shoring up the speculation would be this ridiculous conspiracy theory: since Teoh was spilling the beans on his Pakatan colleagues, underworld figures cannot allow this to happen and quickly dispatched an assassin to “silence” him. And he could easily have been killed elsewhere and dumped at where he was found to beef up someone’s or some agency’s culpability.

If MP for Wangsa Maju Wee Choo Keong’s allegation that a certain Selangor Exco member had used his office as a rendezvous point for people connected to the underworld, then the assassination lead is plausible but in all probabibility, could only exist in a fantastic Hollywood movie script.

The crux of the argument is that everything is plausible and probable, but nothing makes sense, at least not in the evidence adduced so far by the forensic team to find out how and why exactly Teoh died. At this point of time, his death cannot yet be truly classified into anything, not murder and not suicide. For all we know, Teoh might have slipped on a banana skin and fell to his death, as absurd as it sounds.

Also, the point of the matter is that while police are investigating Teoh’s death, speculations and inferences help nobody but blabbermouths and rumour-mongers with a very public agenda to succeed. A thorough investigation is mandated, a Royal Commission of Inquiry if necessary, as exhorted by Khairy Jamaluddin, who beat Lim Kit Siang and Anwar Ibrahim to the punch in calling for the RCI.

But Khairy has an addendum to his outrage: he had been shadowing Kit’s Tweeter alerts and has cautioned the DAP strongman that while the truth is desired, Kit should not jump to conclusions. “We want the truth but @limkitsiang should be very careful w/ his tweets & not insinuate anything,” Khairy stated in his Tweeter.

If Kit and gang can form a mob of candlelight vigil outside the Selangor MACC headquarters and rant that the MACC wasted their time by being stubbornly silent on all inquiries, the inverse could also be stated that Teoh’s death, while catastrophic, was also the perfect opportunity to be capitalised upon to distract attention from the investigations into the PR assemblymen’s misuse of state allocations.

Furthermore, can the same MACC officials conducting the misuse of funds probe continue with their arduous task? For now, it looks impossible, seeing that calls for them to be suspended are relentless. And that too, the devil’s advocate would chime, would be very convenient for the suspects in the probe.

Already, the DAP-inspired mob vigil has had a scrape with police and the arrests inevitable. What the police don’t need now is a counter demonstration that will likely escalate into something uglier. But human beings being what they are, especially politicians with testosterones to burn and the choir to appease, altercations like these are the convenient sleight of hand to deflect attention from the real issue, whatever they may be.

There were also premature calls that the MACC review its standard operating procedure for conducting interviews of persons of interest to an ongoing case. This is not helpful because it insinuates that the MACC is at fault when we don’t even know yet how and why Teoh died. The MACC may or may not realise it but the circumstances leading to Teoh’s death could also make the agency look like a textbook patsy.

There are just too many complex questions that can be asked as to how and why Teoh died. If you were to play devil’s advocate, you could conjure leads in all the players involve - MACC, Pakatan Rakyat and the Selangor Government. For now, it’s all too confusing and every demands made now merely inflames already fraught emotions.

Let the authorities probe the death first, scrupulously, meticulously and methodically, so as to check blame from being tactlessly assigned. In the meantime, the best thing to help Teoh, and his family, gain privacy and some measure of closure is to bite your tongue, keep your trap shut and zip it, at least in public, for the stoking of communal flames is far more deadly than the tragic death of a junior politician.