The wife of former prime minister Najib Razak alighted from her silver Mercedes-Benz at 10.45am yesterday clad in a blue Malay dress (baju kurung) and red headscarf.

But it was her handbag that caught the media’s attention.

The spotlight was understandable, given the huge publicity surrounding what her collection of luxury handbags seized during recent police raids in Kuala Lumpur.

Photographs of Rosmah’s handbag were quickly uploaded online, with social media users “investigating” its provenance. Many concluded that it is a Vanitas Demetra from Versace’s 20132014 fall/winter collection.

According to an online description by the label, it is made of “quilted leather Barocco”.

Checks with a Versace store revealed that the handbag has not been sold for the past two years and was previously priced at RM5,000 to RM6,000, depending on size.

Rosmah appeared calm and was accompanied by her daughter Nooryana Najwa Najib, soninlaw Daniyar Kessikbayev and her lawyers.

She was called in by the MACC as officers continued their probe into SRC International Sdn Bhd.

SRC International was created in 2011 by the previous administration to pursue overseas investments in energy re??sources and was a unit of 1Malaysia Development Bhd until it was moved to the Finance Ministry in 2012.

Two weeks ago, Najib was called twice to have his statement recorded on the same case.

Rosmah emerged at 3.40pm and left without speaking to reporters.

Lawyers Datuk K. Kumaraendran and Datuk Geethan Ram Vincent told the media that MACC had completed taking a statement from their client.

“Datin Seri Rosmah gave her utmost cooperation during the process and was treated well by the investigating officers. The threehour process went well,” said Kumaraendran.

“Our client will extend further cooperation as and when sought by the agency.”

MACC sources also confirmed that they had concluded questioning Rosmah.

“We will probably not be calling her again for this case, but if there is a need to take down Datin Seri Rosmah’s statement on other matters, then we will ask for her cooperation again,” a source said.

Members of the media, who started arriving at 9am, found that security had been beefed up at the MACC headquarters.

Reporters had to record their names at the main gate and their bags were checked.

MACC officers said this was to ensure only accredited reporters were allowed in.

The National Police’s counterterrorism unit, Densus 88, arrested on Saturday three Riau University (Unri) alumni over an alleged plan to launch an attack on the House of Representatives building in Jakarta and the Riau Council building in Pekanbaru.

The arrests marked the first time law enforcement personnel arrested suspected terrorists inside a university. Police have in the past arrested university students and alumni allegedly connected to terrorist groups, but all of the arrests were made away from campus.

After the arrests in Riau, the Medan-based North Sumatra University (USU), located in Riau’s neighboring province of North Sumatra, instructed all university departments to stop activities on the institution’s premises by 10 p.m.

“Every course taught at USU must end by 9:30 p.m. After that time, we prohibit [students and lecturers] from holding activities [inside the USU compound] to anticipate anything related to radicalism,” said USU rector Runtung Sitepu on Monday.

Rundung said that even though USU had yet to discover any activity related to radicalism being conducted on the university premises, the university’s central office had visited all departments to “convey moral messages” to lecturers and students about the danger of “being contaminated by radical teachings”.

Of the three men arrested on Saturday, one has been declared a suspect by the police, while the other two were declared witnesses.

The police have said the suspect, identified as Muhammad Nur Zamzam, was connected to Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), a local pro-Islamic State (IS) extremist group accused of launching the recent terror attacks in numerous areas in Indonesia, including in Riau province.

On Monday, scholars from Unri, located in Riau province’s capital of Pekanbaru, endorsed a declaration to “strengthen its commitment to combating” terrorism, radicalism and intolerance, which they considered as “activities that violate the law and intend to divide the NKRI”, referring to the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia.

Unri rector Aras Mulyadi said the university would take several measures to prevent radicalism from spreading within the institution, with one such measure being the intensive monitoring and controlling of student activities carried out at Unri.

“The recent event [the arrest] must be the first and the last to take place at Unri,” Aras said.

Police officers stand guard in front of a student facility building in Riau University in Pekanbaru, Riau province on June 2. Students and alumni often spend the night in such buildings.

Police officers stand guard in front of a student facility building in Riau University in Pekanbaru, Riau province on June 2. Students and alumni often spend the night in such buildings. (Antara/Rony Muharrman)

Educational institutions like universities had long been seen as places where people could freely conduct any activity, including “negative activities”, said Abdul Rasyid Jalil, deputy rector of Hasanuddin University (Unhas) in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.

“That is why we have intensified our monitoring of activities conducted in either departments or student extracurricular groups,” Abdul said.

Unhas has begun the intensified monitoring because many alumni are still involved in student organizations held inside the university compound, said Abdul.

Abdul said Unhas also prohibited activities from being held inside the university after 10 p.m.

The police’s initial investigation revealed that the suspected terrorists in Riau had stayed in the building for one month, during which time they allegedly constructed bombs and planned to blow up the Riau Legislative Council in Pekanbaru and the House of Representatives in Jakarta.

“There were explosive materials at the scene on campus. We deemed them to be dangerous, so the measures [to remove them] were taken when there was no academic activity going on inside the campus,” said National Police spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammad Iqbal.

The arrests on Saturday showed that members of terror groups are approaching and recruiting students or academics at educational institutions, said Ridwan Habib, a terrorism expert at the University of Indonesia (UI) in Depok, West Java.

“These groups often use a personal approach to recruit those with prior links to other Islamic groups that have values similar to those they offer,” said Ridwan on Sunday.

Radicalism on campuses

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Mohamad Nasir told the Indonesian press recently that the government held data about universities whose students were exposed to radical ideas on campus. Since then, a list of seven top state universities has circulated, quoting the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) as the source.

The seven are: University of Indonesia, Airlangga University, Brawijaya University, Sepuluh November Technology University, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bogor Agriculture Institute and Diponegoro University.

Last year, the ministry said it planned to issue a regulation to control the spread of radical views on campuses. A search of regulations on their website on Monday, using the keywords “radikalisme” and “radikal”, did not reveal any results.

What the ministry and the BNPT meant about “exposure to radicalism” was radical teachings and persuasion by outside influences to join radical movements on campus.

However, terrorism expert Ridwan Habib said students and other members of academia exposed to extremist teachings were not necessarily part of a radical group or likely to become involved in terror acts.

Based on The Jakarta Post’s interview with Zamzam’s friend at Riau University, Zamzam was not a devout Muslim and was not known to have joined any Quran recital groups anywhere.

The friend, Syahrul Mubarak, who referred to Zamzam as Zega, said he knew Zamzam as they enrolled at the university in the same year and because both were members of the university’s mountaineering club. Syahrul said Zamzam had not been a devout Muslim until a year ago, and described him as preman mau insaf, loosely translated as a “repentant delinquent”.

Syahrul said Zamzam began to change when he read about Palestine’s fight for its own country and about IS on the internet.

“All of a sudden, he started bragging that he wanted to carry out jihad, talking about bombs and going to Syria. We, the friends who usually hung out with him, of course laughed at him,” Syahrul told the Post on Monday. “Don’t get us wrong, he is not a devout figure. He does not even pray five times a day. If there were people drinking together, he joined [them],” he said.

Syahrul believed the other two alumni arrested along with Zamzam were less likely to be involved in terrorist activities.

The 73-year-old grandfather had offered a free book in exchange for a kiss during a trip to South Korea. He called a woman, Bea Kim, onto the platform during a speech on Sunday and pointed to his lips.

She initially hesitated, saying she had a husband, but later offered no protest as Duterte kissed her on the lips while the mostly Filipino crowd cheered and shrieked in apparent approval.

“We enjoyed it. It was a showbiz (thing) and everybody enjoyed it,” Duterte told reporters upon his arrival back in Manila.

“I do not do it in public if there is malice.”

Duterte even said he was willing to step down over the issue if complaints mounted.

“I think if all women here would sign a petition for me to resign, I will resign.”

Since being elected in mid-2016, Duterte has caused uproar for his comments on women, including rape jokes, boasting about adultery, shaming female critics and inciting soldiers to shoot female guerillas in the vagina.

Women’s groups and opposition lawmakers accused Duterte of abusing his position and misogyny following the latest incident, as footage of the kiss spread on social media.

The woman herself later told state-run Philippine media that there was “no malice” in the act, though Duterte critics said he had put her under pressure.

A defiant Duterte said the incident was “natural”.

He said he had been kissing women on the lips in public for years, including when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao where he cast himself as a populist leader.

“That is my style. Find your own style. There is nothing wrong in a simple kiss — you cause an uproar. They are just jealous,” he said.

However the president, who has a daughter with his former wife and another with his current partner, said he expected them to confront him about the incident.

“You women, it’s better if you just help me explain to them that it was just natural,” Duterte said.

A company owned by Malaysia’s finance ministry signed the 9.4-billion ringgit deal in 2016 for a Chinese state-owned company to build a gas pipeline and an oil pipeline.

Najib Razak — toppled in elections last month — was prime minister at the time, and battling allegations billions of dollars were looted from sovereign wealth fund 1MDB.

The pipeline deal was one of a series of big-ticket, Beijing-backed projects signed during Najib’s leadership, fuelling suspicions China was helping the scandal-mired leader pay off debts racked up by the stricken fund.

Malaysia’s Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said Tuesday that 8.25 billion ringgit had already been drawn down by the Chinese company building the pipelines.

This amounted to almost 88 percent of the project value — yet only 13 percent of the work had been completed, he said in a statement.

Lim said he had instructed officials to file a report about the “highly suspicious transactions” with anti-corruption authorities and noted that the company behind the deal had links to a scandal-mired, former subsidiary of 1MDB.

“We have documents to prove… it’s all part of the 1MDB scam,” the minister was cited as saying in The Star newspaper.

State-owned Export-Import Bank of China provided 85 percent of the funding for the project with the rest required to be raised by issuing sukuk, or Islamic bonds, Lim said.

Najib insisted in a statement late Tuesday there was no wrongdoing in the project, saying he and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang witnessed the signing of memoranda of understanding for the deal in Beijing in 2017.

The toppled leader, who has been questioned twice by graft investigators since losing power, said he was “confident” that all necessary “procedures and laws have been complied with” in the deal.

He said “great care” should be taken “when making such serious politically-motivated public allegations involving foreign state-owned companies as it may have a negative effect on foreign relations and international trade”.

Public disgust over allegations of corruption linked to Najib and his cronies was a major factor in his surprise election loss last month to an alliance headed by Mahathir Mohamad.

Paul Robilliard, ambassador to Thailand, and Jean Bernard Carrasco, ambassador to Laos, presided at the 9am ceremony with Ronachai on the span linking Nong Khai to Laos.

The deputy chief of the Lao border checkpoint at the bridge also attended.

The ambassadors hailed the bridge as a symbol of the strong ties between the neighbouring nations.

His Majesty the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Laos’ then-president Nouhak Phoumsavanh and Australia’s then-prime minister Paul Keating opened the Friendship Bridge on April 8, 1994.

Nong Khai Customs said 1.336 million vehicles crossed the span last year, carrying goods into Laos worth Bt63.164 million.

The year the bridge opened, just 19,053 vehicles made the crossing.

Last year 3.7 million people used the border checkpoint.

PETALING JAYA: The family of Ivana Esther Robert Smit is offering a US$50,000 (RM198,725) reward to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the Dutch model’s death.

Netherlands news portal NL Times reported that Sebas Diekstra, the lawyer representing the family, said that the next of kin found that there was too little progress in the case, which prompted them to take this step.

“The relatives hope that the amount (of the reward) is large enough to persuade people with useful information, who have hitherto been silent, to come forward,” the lawyer was quoted as saying on Monday (June 4).

Last December, the 19-year-old victim who has dual Dutch and Belgian citizenship fell from the 20th floor of an apartment in Jalan Dang Wangi, KL and landed on a balcony on the sixth floor.

It is believed that Smit was in the apartment with American businessman Alex Johnson, 44, and his Kazakh wife Luna, 31, after spending a night out with them.

The Johnsons have admitted to having a threesome with her on the night itself and also months before her death.

Malaysian police have classified the case as sudden death pending the results of the post-mortem and pathology tests.

A private investigator hired by Smit’s family to look into her death said the case should be classified as murder.

About eight million tonnes of plastic waste are dumped into the world’s oceans every year, the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic being tipped into the sea every minute of every day.

More than half comes from five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, according to a 2015 Ocean Conservancy report.

They are among the fastest growing economies in Asia, where much of the world’s plastic is produced, consumed and discarded — most of it improperly in countries where waste management is at best patchy.

“We are in a plastic pollution crisis, we can see it everywhere in our rivers, in our oceans… we need to do something about it,” Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner Ahmad Ashov Birry told AFP.

World Environment Day on Tuesday is highlighting the perils of plastic with the tagline “if you can’t reuse it, refuse it”.

But it is not just an issue of aesthetics, plastics are killing marine life.

Last week a whale died in southern Thailand with 80 plastic bags in its stomach, an increasingly common sight alongside dead seabirds and turtles gorged on plastic and washed ashore.

Invisible threat

Experts warn the greatest threat might be invisible.

Microplastics — tiny shards that easily soak up toxins after breaking off from larger plastic pieces — have been found in tap water, ground water and inside fish that millions of people eat across Asia every day.

Scientists still do not fully understand the health effects of consuming microplastics.

“We’re conducting a global experiment with no sense of where we’re heading with this whole thing,” Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine and polar programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told AFP.

That worries Vietnamese fisherwoman Nguyen Thi Phuong, whose sleepy village on the South China Sea coast in Thanh Hoa province has slowly transformed into a dump site over the years.

“It’s unbearable, people discard their garbage here… it’s so polluted for the children, it’s not safe,” she said in the baking heat thick with the smell of trash and fish.

In the nearby mangrove forest, her neighbours dig through warm, trash-speckled mud for snails or shrimp.

But the tree branches above are blanketed with faded plastic bags left behind from tidal waters that wash up fresh waste every day.

A one-kilometre (half-mile) stretch of beach is lined with sandals, biscuit wrappers, tubes of Japanese toothpaste, juice boxes, fishing nets, furniture and heaps of discarded clothing, as piles of trash burn nearby.

“It’s hard for us to work here finding shrimp and fish,” said fisherman Vu Quoc Viet, who often finds plastic trash in his nets.

More plastic than fish by 2050

Rubbish collection is low in rural Vietnam as elsewhere in Asia, one of the main reasons why so much plastic ends up in the sea, according to Joi Danielson, programme director of Oceans Plastics Asia at SYSTEMIQ.

On average only about 40 percent of garbage is properly collected in the five plastic-addled countries that spit out most of the ocean’s trash, with few resources dedicated to proper waste management especially in mushrooming mega-cities.

Plus, plastic consumption — and waste — continues to balloon along with growing incomes and dependence on plastic products integral to almost every aspect of daily life.

“You’re battling against this constantly growing target,” Danielson told AFP.

At the current rate of dumping, the total amount of plastic trash in the world’s oceans is expected to double to 250 million tonnes by 2025, according to Ocean Conservancy.

That means there could be more plastic than fish in the world’s seas by 2050 if the nothing is done to turn the tide.

‘Not rocket science’

Environmentalists are looking to China to lead by example when it comes to tackling the problem.

Last year the world’s second largest economy said it would stop importing the West’s recycling, refusing to be “the world’s garbage dump”.

But the vast majority of China’s waste is homegrown and collection remains low in rural areas, according to Danielson.

Experts agree that while the problem seems daunting with plastic waste so ubiquitous throughout Asia, it is a crisis with a solution.

Social media campaigns calling for plastic bans and viral videos like the one featuring British diver Rich Horner swimming through clouds of trash off the coast of Bali have helped to spark pubic awareness.

Improved waste collection and reduced consumption have been flagged as crucial next steps.

Ocean Conservancy has also called for new plastic materials and product designs and more investment into waste-to-energy and waste-to-fuel schemes.

For Lundin, political will is perhaps the biggest hurdle at the moment.

“It’s not rocket science… there’s no place that couldn’t fix it if they decided they had to,” he said.

The spotlight is now on Rosmah Mansor after police last month raided two condominiums linked to Najib and his family as part of an investigation into his role in the 1MDB scandal — seizing bags of cash, jewellery and hundreds of designer handbags.

Rosmah, 66, is widely reviled for her reported luxurious tastes and imperious manner. She last month issued a statement lashing out at media coverage of the police raids, calling them a “premature public trial”.

Known for her love of luxury clothes and handbags, Rosmah arrived in a three-car convoy.

“Her questioning by graft busters will be intense and thorough,” Abdul Razak Idris, former investigations and intelligence director at the Malaysia Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), told AFP.

“She may also be asked to reveal her bank accounts and explain about the source of the cash and jewellery found by police in two condominiums recently.”

Billions of dollars were allegedly stolen from the 1MDB fund — founded by Najib — in a sophisticated fraud that stretched from Singapore to Switzerland, with the money used to buy items ranging from Picasso artworks to high-end real estate.

Both Najib and the fund have consistently denied any wrongdoing.

The ex-premier has seen a swift fall from grace since he was defeated by a reformist coalition led by his former mentor, Mahathir Mohamed, in elections last month.

Voter anger at claims of corruption tied to Najib and a rise in living costs were among major factors in the shocking defeat of the ruling coalition, which had been in power for over six decades.

Najib himself was questioned by anti-graft officers twice last month. Both he and his wife have been banned from leaving the country.

The luxury-loving Rosmah is often compared with Imelda Marcos, who left behind more than a thousand pairs of shoes after her husband, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, was ousted in 1986.

In 2015, Rosmah told a public gathering that she paid 1,200 ringgit ($300) to colour her hair, angering Malaysians as the minimum wage was then just 900 ringgit a month.