Sodomy II not an open and shut case

AUG 6 — The way some government officials see it, Opposition icon Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will be charged in court on Thursday, a few days should be set aside for the sodomy trial and the whole unsavoury episode should be wrapped up in the shortest possible time.

And then the whole country can move on. Guess what? It is not going to happen.

Sodomy II is not going to be an open and shut case. Not when you have in the dock, a politician fighting to salvage his career and maintain the respect of his family members and supporters.

Not when there remain questions about Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, Anwar's former aide who alleged that he was sodomised by the former deputy prime minister on June 26 in a condominium in the tony neighbourhood of Damansara.

Buckets of muck are going to be flung during the trial and some of it will land on Anwar, some on Saiful, some on Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak, some on the Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail, and some on the police force led by Tan Sri Musa Hassan.

By the time the verdict is delivered, it will be tough to separate the winners from the losers.

Sources have told The Malaysian Insider that police and government officials believe that they have sufficient physical and circumstantial evidence to obtain a conviction against Anwar. This includes DNA evidence, CCTV tapes and witness accounts.

But they acknowledge that the weakest link in the case could be Saiful. More specifically his behaviour and events leading to him lodging a police report could be tricky for the prosecution.

Saiful's decision to visit Najib at his Bukit Tunku home a few days before lodging a police report against Anwar adds a political dimension to the case, as does his move to hawk his story to several other politicians.

To be fair, it appears that the politicians - mindful of the stench still associated with the first sodomy charge 10 years ago - all advised Saiful to take his case to the police. He then visited the police and encountered a blue wall of doubt. As the story goes, police investigators were unwilling to accept his story at face value and sent him packing, telling him to return only with something more substantial.

He did so days later.

Anwar's battery of criminal lawyers will move to paint him as a pawn in a high-stakes political conspiracy, and will drag the police in as enablers in this scheme.

They will try and discredit the DNA evidence, dredging up the events of 1998 when Anwar's semen sample on a mattress allegedly used for his sexual liaisons was challenged.

The lawyers will want to know why Saiful continued to work as Anwar's aide and even agreed to go to the condominium on June 26, despite alleging that he was sexually assaulted during overseas trips to Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta.

Was he a willing partner? Was he a political plant? These and other questions will be asked during a trial which could be as meandering and damaging to the country and its institutions as Sodomy I was 10 years ago.

Open and shut case? Not a chance.

-TMI