While Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar contends that the number of Special Branch (SB) officers in the Malaysian police force is a secret, Kulai MP Teo Nie Ching points out that the figure is given in the 2014 Budget.

NONETeo (right) said the 2014 Budget states that 8,196 personnel are assigned to “security intelligence” work, whose objective is to “ensure national security through covert and overt intelligence gathering on threats from communists, subversive and extremist elements, intelligence-gathering, domestic spying, and external threats”.

In other words, she said, these 8,196 personnel are essentially SB personnel.

“Since the number of positions for Security Intelligence or SB is written in the 2014 Budget, it proves that it is very wrong for Wan Junaidi to say that our SB is equivalent to the (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the (British) MI6 and thus their numbers are sensitive information that should not be disclosed.

“Unfortunately, he has slapped his own face, since the 2014 Budget reveals these numbers,” Teo said in a statement today.

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She had posed a question to the prime minister, asking for the  numbers of police officers in different departments, including the SB.

However, when the question was finally raised in Parliament on July 9, it had been amended – supposedly without her knowledge - to have the question directed to the home minister, and with the mention of Special Branch left out.


'Special Branch a tool of the BN government'

What remained was a question asking for the number of police officers in the management, criminal investigation, internal security and public order, commercial crimes, narcotics and logistics departments of the force.

NONEAsked about this, Wan Junaidi (left) said, “Even if you see CIA and MI6, or other intelligence agencies, they don’t tell you how many people they have. Certain things we can’t disclose.”

He also denied that his ministry amended the question, but that the parliamentary secretary and the speaker have the right to do so.

Teo claimed that the Home Ministry’s reluctance to reveal the number of SB personnel shows that the latter are a BN tool to be used against political opponents.

She further questioned Speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia’s impartiality, claiming that she has yet to receive any response when she filed a complaint to Pandikar, on July 10, about the amendment to her question.

Yesterday, when debating the budget, DAP’s Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim pointed out that number of SB officers in the police force under Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak appears to be worse off than during the first period of Emergency.

Sim said that in 1954, there was just 459 personnel, two percent of the entire police force, but by 2012, there were 8,200 SB officers.

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