PETALING JAYA: An award winning journalist wants the police to correct the facts that it was him and not them, who had found and exposed the presence of mass graves along the border township of Wang Kelian, Perlis in 2015.
The relevant agencies have since exhumed 139 bodies from the site, and the victims are believed to be Rohingha refugees from Myanmar, who were victims of an international human trafficking ring.
S. Arulldas, who has served with several news organisations including theSun, said that the police and his peers need to be careful with the dissemination of information.
“It has to be fact-based and it must be recorded,” Aruldass said in an interview.
Earlier, he held a press conference in Penang, where he had condemned the facts allegedly given by the police on the matter, as they provided an impression that they were the ones who had found out about the mass graves.
S. Arulldas said that he did not understand why the media and the police failed to recognise or give credit to him and photographer Sayuti Zainuddin for the sacrifices that they made to expose the injustices done against these migrant workers.
“I am compelled to set the record straight and nothing more than that.”
Arulldas, won an award from the National Human Right Commission in 2015 for outstanding reporting on the issue, and later in 2016 he was bestowed with an excellence in investigative journalism award by the Malaysian Press Institute (MPI).
Arulldass said he was prompted to raise the matter after a recent Bernama report which stated it was the police, who announced the finding of the graves.
“In reality, it was us and subsequently the rest of the media fraternity, who came to cover the event. The police only reacted when the reports filed by us came out.”
The Home Ministry has since revealed the formation of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate what transpired in Wang Kelian, the rustic and sleeping border town.
