Death sentence stands for Malaysian guard

Malaysia will not reconsider the death sentence of a former commando who killed a woman with links to the PM.

Former commando Sirul Azhar Umar.

Malaysia will not reconsider the death sentence of Sirul Azhar Umar, a former commando convicted of the murder of a woman with links to the country’s highest office, in order to have him extradited from Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre.

Responding to questions in parliament from Malaysia’s ­opposition, Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said there was no room for the government to commute the death sentence for Sirul, a bodyguard with an elite protection force for Malaysia’s top political leaders at the time of the murder.

“If the government wishes to make an extradition request to a country that does not support the death sentence, the government can negotiate by considering punishments other than the death sentence,” Mr Zahid said.

“In the case of Sirul Azhar, the government does not have room for negotiation with the Australian government as the Federal Court had sentenced Sirul to death.”

Sirul fled to Brisbane in October 2014 as Malaysia’s Federal Court considered whether to ­reinstate his conviction, overturned on appeal, for the 2006 murder of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu.

The 28-year-old mother of two was abducted by Sirul and a second police commando from outside the Kuala Lumpur home of her former lover Razak Abdul Baginda, a close confidante of then defence minister (now Prime Minister) Najib Razak, and a key mediator in a billion-dollar submarine defence deal.

During his trial, Sirul testified that he had acted under orders from higher authorities, and was being used as a scapegoat to “protect unnamed people”. He was reconvicted and sentenced to death in January 2015 and ­arrested shortly after by Australian immigration authorities. He has since been held in Villawood as Malaysia drags its heels on a promised extradition order.

In January last year he ­released three videos from detent­ion exonerating Mr Najib of any link to Shaariibuu or her murder, and recanting a previous­ allegation that she was pregnant with the child of a ­“certain person”.

There is little motivation for Malaysia to extradite the former policeman, who would face polit­ically explosive questions in a civil trial on his return.

It has been speculated that Shaariibuu was killed for threatening to reveal details of kickbacks allegedly paid by French contractors to secure a submarine deal which Mr Baginda was negotiating on behalf of the ­Defence Ministry. Papers ­reportedly retrieved from her hotel room suggest she may have been blackmailing Mr Baginda for refusing to pay her a promised $US500,000 translator fee.