KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 1 — The police have denied rapper Namewee’s claims of the poor conditions of a lock-up in Penang where sick Myanmar detainees were held. In dismissing Namewee’s (Wee Meng Chee) claims, Penang police chief Comm Datuk Abdul Ghafar Rajab pointed out that there is an existing standard operation procedure (SOP) for police to comply with and that detainees who are ill would be brought to the hospital. “If he is sincere, then please lodge a police report so we can open an investigation. “However, if the allegations are found to be untrue, we will investigate them as a false report,” he was quoted saying by local daily The Star. According to The Star, Wee or Namewee had made the claims on social media, following his recent four-day remand at the Bayan Baru police lock-up over his music video Oh My God!. In the social media postings that The Star said had been removed, he reportedly spoke of meeting 15 illegal immigrants from Myanmar, where some had allegedly spent more than a month in detention. He had claimed that these detainees were placed in small cells with poor conditions, adding that they were in poor health, while also voicing his suspicion that some were suffering from tuberculosis. Former Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) commissioner James Nayagam reportedly said that he would only give an average rating of two on a scale of one to 10 on the conditions of lock-ups, prisons and detention centres in Malaysia. He said he had visited almost all of such detention areas in his six years as a commissioner and found there were no proper trained medical personnel to oversee the detainees’ health. “The highest health threat is tuberculosis, followed by skin diseases, because all detainees are put together,” he was quoted saying by The Star, adding that his shirts “stank” each time he walked out from such detention areas. Last Friday, the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC) chairman Datuk Yaakob Md Sam refuted claims by several media including The Cambodian Daily of fatal abuse of detainees by officers at the Juru immigration detention centre in Penang. Yaakob said a joint August 22 surprise visit by EAIC and Suhakam instead found that the six deaths recorded at the detention centre since last year was instead due to health-related reasons. The causes of death for the six that were listed in the EAIC statement included pneumonia, sepsis with pneumonia, sepsis as complication of diabetes mellitus, septicaemia with bronchopneumonia. Sepsis and septicaemia are situations related to bacterial infections. 

Source: The Malay Mail