COMMENT PKR MP for Sungai Petani, Johari Abdul, turns ‘Hercule Poirot’ in a 30-minute video that attempts a refutation of the claim that it was Anwar Ibrahim in the sex video for which in court today three persons who first purveyed the film pleaded guilty and were fined.

Hercule Poirot is the fictional detective in a series of literary whodunits by the famed English writer Agatha Christie.

Johari sports a mustache and is tubby like Christie’s fictional sleuth and, on the basis of the video he produced, as piquantly sharp as the Belgian gumshoe.

NONEJohari (right in photo) this afternoon gave the press a preview of the video which he said had taken him 34 days to produce and several more weeks to delve into before arriving at a cogent refutation of the claim that the man captured in the sex video which was first played before a selected audience that included media representatives at the Carcosa Seri Negera on March 22.

According to Johari’s video analysis, in which the PKR MP appears as narrator, the size and shape of the man’s tummy, size of the breasts, nose and hair at the back of the head are markedly different to corresponding parts of Anwar’s body.

Johari’s presentation shows several video grabs of Anwar on that day in the fourth week of last February when the tape allegedly showing the PKR supremo in a transaction with a sex worker was made.

Anwar was in court that day and the video grab of his leaving the court shows that the hair at the back of his head is much thicker than that worn by the man in the sex video.

NONEThe hair on the back of Anwar’s head is usually worn thick and not closely cropped as depicted in the sex video. Also shown up close, Anwar’s nose is shorter and flatter than the nose of the man in the sex video.

The comparison of ‘stills’ collated from video grabs of the sex tape and of tapes of Anwar in court and other places in late February is graphic video evidence in support of the notion that the man is not Anwar, though in court today counsel for the defence claimed that American experts had concluded that the person in the sex video is 99.99% Anwar.

There were no grounds for the counsel to drag Anwar’s name into today’s proceedings because the matter before the court was a charge concerning possession and showing of pornographic material. The identity of the persons in the video was not a matter for adjudication.

But such is the febrile nature of this controversy that matters not germane to it are suborned in support of tendentious conclusions.  

Anwar sexgate

Since it first surfaced, the sex video has become a media sensation and although one of its original possessors, Shazryl Eskay Abdullah, has asserted that there was one only copy which had he had long since surrendered to the police, thousands of copies of the video have been circulated in recent weeks to individuals, homes and mosques.

The ‘Anwar sexgate’ has become a cause célèbre, a fact Johari lamented because, as he said, there are socio-political matters of dire import in the country but many Malaysians continue to be transfixed by what he called a ‘libelous fabrication’.  

Johari’s deductions point to Thailand as the probable place of the sex video’s manufacture. He also deduces that the video was filmed in color but was converted into black and white film to obscure the differences in the physiognomy of the man in ‘fabricated’ video and Anwar.

But, from Johari’s findings, enhanced ‘still’ photographic techniques enabled him to point out the differences between both individuals.

All in all, Johari’s technological sleuthing and his deductions attest the truth of GK Chesterton’s observation that people who stoop to pick up any weapon to beat their opponents would soon find that they wind up with a boomerang.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.