Former Malaysian police officer Sirul Azhar Umar, who is now in Australian custody, has claimed he was ordered by “important people” to murder Altantuya Shaariibuu in 2006.

Altantuya was the lover of Abdul Razak Baginda — a former close associate of now deposed Malaysian premier Najib Razak — who was accused of arranging kickbacks for the purchase of French submarines in 2002.

Opponents of Najib’s government have long alleged that Sirul and accomplice Azilah Hadri, members of an elite unit that guards top Malaysian ministers, were scapegoats in the killing to hide the involvement of their masters at the highest levels of government.

Sirul has previously threatened to reveal who gave the order.

Reformist politician Anwar, who was released from prison Wednesday after his sodomy conviction was quashed by the king following Najib being toppled, suggested Sirul should be brought back to Malaysia for a fresh trial.

He told The Australian newspaper the original trial and the judges’ ruling was “compromised” and the reluctance of the judges to call relevant witnesses “made a mockery of the law”.

“The best way is to proffer a new charge and allow for a full hearing of the case,” he said.

Anwar is the presumptive successor to new Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad following a stunning election upset last week, with his one-time nemesis turned ally vowing to step down in a year or two to make way for him.

‘Don’t say anything’

Sirul was reportedly detained in Australia in 2015 and has been held in custody since, although Canberra has never officially confirmed this.

A report in the Guardian last week said his bid for a protection visa would be heard within months. Authorities refused to confirm this to AFP or comment on other details of the case.

According to the newspaper, Canberra has allowed Malaysian officials and their middlemen to meet with him regularly, including one from Najib’s United Malays National Organisation party’s youth wing a fortnight ago.

It cited a source as saying the Malaysian visitor delivered a message to his countryman: “Don’t say anything”.

The scandal is one of Malaysia’s most sensitive topics, with suspicions swirling for years that Altantuya was murdered to keep her quiet about shenanigans in the submarine deal.

Najib has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing over the deal amid allegations that French submarine maker DCNS paid “commissions” of more than 114 million euros (US$142 million) for two Scorpene submarines, which Malaysian critics allege were kickbacks.

Altantuya, 28, was shot dead and her body blown up with military-grade plastic explosives outside Kuala Lumpur.

Sirul and Azilah were convicted in 2009 and sentenced to hang. They were later released when an appeals court overturned the conviction in 2013 after raising questions about how their trial was conducted.

But Malaysia’s highest court upheld their death sentences in 2015. Sirul fled the country ahead of that ruling.

Specialists and Rohingya volunteers are racing against time to find women in the giant camp who are thought to be hiding their pregnancies out of shame, as fears grow that newborns could be abandoned and new mothers may die without care in coming weeks.

Tosminara, herself a Rohingya refugee, has spent months coaxing these women out of the shadows, promising discretion.

“We tell them a password they can use when they arrive at the hospital or health post. The guard then sends the woman directly to the right spot,” said Tosminara, who goes by one name.

“They often are shy. Sometimes they are afraid to come forward.”

The Myanmar army crackdown last August drove roughly 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh and the number of pregnancies resulting from rape is not known.

But UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour said there would “inevitably” be a spike in births soon given the “frenzy of sexual violence in August and September last year”.

Marcella Kraay of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also said “a fair number of pregnancies” were expected.

An estimated 48,000 women will give birth in the camps this year. Those who were raped will be delivering imminently, mostly in secret and without medical care on the floors of bamboo shacks overlooking the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

Rohingya community leader Abdur Rahim said he knew two women personally who were raped by soldiers and due within the month. He had heard rumours of many others in a similar position, he added.

“The Myanmar military raped them. These babies are… evidence of their crimes,” he told AFP.

Traumatised and alone

Tosminara says she is trying her best to find these women in the heaving camps. But volunteers must contend with a deep-rooted stigma that keeps many from revealing their ordeal.

“Sometimes neighbours say ‘don’t do anything, it will humiliate you further’. So they don’t want to come,” said Nurjahan Mitu, a doctor who trains midwives through a UN Population Fund programme.

Many have sought clinical help to terminate pregnancies — legal in Bangladesh up to 12 weeks.

Others have resorted to underground options resulting in “complicated, incomplete abortions”, said MSF midwife Daniela Sofia.

The UN’s Gilmour, who toured the camps in March, said girls as young as 14 were self-inducing abortions.

Sofia, the midwife, assisted a 16-year-old with an abortion after the teenager arrived at her clinic in secret, terrified that her family would find out.

She said the girl was pregnant after being gang-raped by Myanmar soldiers, but had no one to support her through the trauma.

“Nobody knew about the rape. Her family were not aware of it,” Sofia told AFP.

More than half the Rohingya who have fled into Bangladesh are women and girls.

Children are seen everywhere but adolescent girls are largely invisible, many kept indoors by families concerned for their welfare, experts say.

Emu Roy, a Bangladeshi midwife, said a paucity of maternity professionals made it difficult to know how many women were suffering in silence in the camps.

“It’s not possible for us to go door-to-door,” she told AFP.

‘Tool of terror’

Experts are concerned that families could forcibly marry off teenage girls to cover up a pregnancy.

Others fear that newborns could be abandoned.

“Not only are you dealing with a woman who has been… traumatised, also there could be a child that is basically unwanted as well,” Kraay said.

MSF alone treated 311 rape victims — women and girls aged between nine and 50 — between August and March but Kraay said this was “the tip of the iceberg”.

The Myanmar army chief has denied allegations his forces used rape to terrorise the Muslim minority.

But the military last month was placed on a UN blacklist for armies and rebels known to use rape in war — joining Nigeria’s Boko Haram and the Islamic State group.

On top of the refugees’ accounts, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten said rape was used as a “calculated tool of terror” to force the Rohingya out of Myanmar.

As the nine-month milestone looms, aid workers are ready to assign abandoned children to women who can breastfeed them, until families are found in the Rohingya community.

“We really want all children — regardless of the conditions or the locations where they are born — to grow up in a happy environment,” Save the Children’s Beatriz Ochoa told AFP.

The Intelligence Committee voted 10-5 to forward her nomination to the entire Senate, virtually assuring that she will earn final approval to lead the US spy agency, replacing Mike Pompeo, who is now Secretary of State.

Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured during years spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, led a push to reject Haspel after she refused to describe the interrogation methods used after the 9/11 attacks as “immoral.”

But she reiterated her opposition to the practice in a letter sent earlier this week to the committee’s senior Democrat, Mark Warner, persuading him to endorse her.

“With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken,” she told Warner in the letter dated Monday.

Warner’s support was matched by one other unnamed Democrat in the secret vote, ensuring the closely divided Senate will also be able to pass Haspel through in a vote expected as early as this week.

It will make Haspel, a 61-year-old Russia specialist, the first-ever woman to lead the CIA, and the first director who spent an entire career in the agency’s clandestine services.

“Gina Haspel is the most qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency,” committee chairman Richard Burr said in a statement.

Warner echoed that sentiment.

“I believe that she will be a strong advocate for the agency’s workforce, and an independent voice who can and will stand up on behalf of our nation’s intelligence community,” he said.

“Most importantly, I believe she is someone who can and will stand up to the president if ordered to do something illegal or immoral — like a return to torture.”

President Donald Trump, in a tweet, called Haspel “exceptionally qualified and the Senate should confirm her immediately. We need her to keep our great country safe!”

But Democrat Ron Wyden, one of the most strident opponents of the torture program, said he still has “grave concerns” about her suitability, rooted in still-classified matters that Haspel and the agency refused to make public.

The refusal to declassify the matters, Wyden said, has “only to do with protecting her own image.”

Out of the shadows

After a lifetime spent in the clandestine service, almost nothing was known about Haspel, even what she looked like, until a sketchy official biography and a few photographs were released in the last two months.

She joined the CIA in 1985, a few years after graduating from a Kentucky university where she studied languages and journalism.

Her first position was in Africa as a case officer, an assignment she says “was right out of a spy novel. It really didn’t get any better than that.”

Learning Russian and Turkish, in the 1990s she worked in Eastern Europe, and was CIA station chief in a country reported as Azerbaijan.

She joined the agency’s Counterterrorism Center on September 11, 2001, the day when Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked and crashed four US airliners, leaving almost 3,000 dead.

It was that period, from 2001 to 2005, that has cast a shadow both on the CIA and Haspel’s resume.

Former CIA officials say Haspel oversaw a secret prison in Thailand run by the agency where Al-Qaeda suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were water-boarded.

She has won praise from some for following orders; others criticize her for not refusing to do so. In her Senate confirmation hearing, she said agents were working under orders they understood were legal.

“We had been charged with making sure the country wasn’t attacked again,” she said.

Her nomination had strong support from inside the agency and across the intelligence community, where even strong opponents of Trump backed her.

“Gina Haspel is precisely the kind of truth teller you want in the room when important decisions are being made,” said former CIA director Michael Hayden.