28-year-old Mongolian beauty Ms Altantuya Shaariibuu with her younger son, Atanshagai. |
Discrepancies in the statements provided by a hotel manager had dealt the prosecution in the case of the murdered Mongolian woman with another setback yesterday.
Prosecution witness Mr Jimmy Loo Mow Chan, 50, the operations manager of Hotel Malaya, gave conflicting statements about whether two men resembling the policemen
accused of murdering the woman had been spotted outside the Hotel Malaya room where she had been staying before she was brutally murdered.
The victim, Ms Altantuya Shaariibuu, had stayed on the eight floor of the hotel sometime before Oct 19 and 20 last year, when her body was blown up with explosives in a jungle.
When the prosecution showed Mr Loo photographs of the footage from the hotel's closed circuit television last Thursday, he identified it as being the hotel's eighth floor.
But when showed the same footage yesterday, the manager claimed it was the seventh floor.
When asked to explain the discrepancies, Mr Loo simply said: "(Last week) I thought it was on the eight floor."
Mr Loo later told the court that after examining the hotel's guest folio, he found out that Ms Altantuya had changed rooms twice.
She first checked into Room 817 on Oct 9 last year, but switched to Room 801 on the same day.
Then, on Oct 14, she changed her hotel room again, this time to Room 821.
However, Mr Loo was not asked about Ms Altantuya's reasons for the room changes, neither did he volunteer to provide any.
The room changes may be a vital clue as to why she changed rooms because she had written, in poor English, in a note found in the hotel room after her death: “He (Abdul Razak Baginda) send his two Indian men to follow me, one of them Suraj Kumar, he been coming to my hotel room every morning around 5am and knocking door, trying to scare me.”
However, prosecution witness N. Haridharan, also Hotel Malaya receptionist, told the court yesterday that the victim had not complained about being harassed while staying in the hotel.
Prosecutors also suffered blows from the technical glitches that arose when they tried to play back footage from Hotel Malaya's CCTV.
The footage might be the key to prove that the two accused policemen had gone to Ms Altantuya’s hotel room hours before they allegedly blasted her body to bits.
When prosecutors ran the footage using the court’s video player, they frequently stalled and displayed still images on the three TV screens in court.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Manoj Kurup, the glitches were due to differences between Hotel Malaya’s decrepit video system and the court’s video player.
He said that he had not tried out the tapes on the court’s video player as they had been sealed as evidence till yesterday.
The CCTV footage was taken at about 4.50pm on Oct 18 last year, the day before Ms Altantuya went missing.
The grainy footage showed fuzzy images of two men, who resembled Azilah and Sirul, hanging about the hotel.
As if the prosecution is not battered enough, its star witness, Azilah’s former girlfriend, reneged on her original police statement which placed Azilah with the victim shortly before her death.
The court has also ruled as inadmissible Sirul’s confession.
