KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 6 — Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail has come out to defend himself against accusations that he has been letting non-Muslims off the hook in cases involving racial and religious insults, insisting that he has not been playing favourites or snoozing on the job.

According to media reports, Abdul Gani said yesterday in a statement that as of March, the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) has been sending weekly reports to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, ministers and department heads on cases of public interest received from the police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).

“Therefore, issues reported in the mainstream media alleging ‘there are reports, but no action’, ‘the AG is keeping silent’, ‘the AG is sleeping’, ‘the AG is incompetent in being fair’ (or) ‘does selective prosecution’ do not arise in any cases of individuals committing a crime,” Abdul Gani was quoted saying.

“The Attorney-General’s Chambers works together with PDRM. The Inspector-General of Police has explained that PDRM has done their best in collecting all the necessary evidence.

“However, PDRM often encounters difficulties when the parties under investigation do not have an IP address, or they have fake email accounts and identities that make it difficult for PDRM to verify them,” he added, using the initials for the Malaysian police force.

Abdul Gani also reportedly said that the police frequently experienced difficulties in obtaining cooperation from other countries in sedition cases.

Yesterday, Umno Youth accused the authorities of being biased towards non-Muslims, citing two cases where the police were seen to have acted swiftly against Muslims.

One was the road rage case where a Malay woman named Siti Fairrah Asyikin Kamaruddin had threatened to attack an elderly Chinese man, while the other was a Muslim cleric who allegedly insulted Hindus in a closed door ceramah he gave a year ago which was later leaked on video sharing site Youtube.

In Umno Youth’s memorandum of protest to the Attorney-General’s Office and the Multimedia Securities Commission of Malaysia, the Malay nationalist party pointed out that the authorities had failed to act quickly against a Chinese man who had complained on Facebook about the loud morning prayers from a mosque in his vicinity.

Malay-language daily Sinar Harian reported MCMC strategic communications senior director Sheikh Raffie Abdul Rahman as saying that it was difficult to track down social media users, including the Facebook user called Kelvin Yip who was accused of insulting Islam.

“This process is time-consuming because the information in the Facebook account is, for example, inaccurate and we found that the individual had used a fake account,” he was quoted saying.