MAP expresses its deepest alarm and outrage over the fatal police shooting of three men in Durian Tunggal, Malacca, on 24 November 2024. Since the incident, the authorities' actions have revealed troubling systemic failures. These failures erode public trust and undermine hopes for a credible investigation.
But at the heart of this tragedy lies one extraordinary piece of evidence—a recording captured by the victim’s wife—that has the power to reshape the entire narrative.
“Once-in-a-Generation Recording” that threatens a decades-long machinery of false Police narratives.
This audio recording is not just another detail in the case. It is an extraordinarily rare, one-in-a-million piece of evidence. It appears to capture the victims in agony, possibly being manhandled, followed by gunshots that silenced them one by one.
The final victim is heard begging for his life. He pleads with the police not to shoot him because he has children. Moments later, another gunshot is heard. After the killings, voices—believed to be police officers—can be heard discussing the scene. Their conversation strongly suggests the crime scene may have been staged to pin the blame on the dead. This would represent one of the most serious policing scandals in Malaysia’s recent history. It directly challenges the long-standing narrative that “they shot at us, so we shot back in self-defence.”
This audio is unprecedented. Communities rarely, if ever, obtain real-time evidence from inside fatal police encounters. It is even rarer to capture the final pleas of a dying man and subsequent conversations that raise the spectre of scene manipulation. Its existence alone exposes how fragile the old police narrative truly is.
And it is precisely because this recording threatens to unravel years of unquestioned explanations in fatal shooting cases that the police appear to be dragging their feet in admitting the rot in their system.
In any credible investigative process, evidence of such significance would have been urgently secured and safeguarded. Instead, the authorities’ inaction has created a troubling perception:
a system slow to pursue truth when truth threatens institutional comfort.
A Familiar Pattern of Delay and Denial
MAP is deeply concerned that police may later try to discredit or dismiss the recording as "tampered" or "inconclusive." This mirrors patterns from past cases where important evidence was set aside when it contradicted official accounts. Authorities may challenge the recording just because it reached the media, as seen with the Albert Tei video. Evidence does not lose value because the public sees it; itbecomes more important.
Waytha Moorthy Ponnusamy
10.12.2025