KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 29 — Examples cited by Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli to criticise the cost of the Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project are intentionally misleading, said the Barisan Nasional today.

The coalition’s strategic communications team said the PKR lawmaker had blindly adopted the claims from a website and used them to attack the project without verifying their accuracy.

Among others, it said he had wrongly called the Barcelona Sants-La Sagrera tunnel a MRT project in order to use its cost of US$39 million per km to portray Malaysia’s MRT line as overpriced.

Rather than a rail project, the line was simply a tunnel with none of the facilities—stations, depots, signalling equipment or trains—that would be necessary to qualify as one, it pointed out.

“It is ridiculous for a Member of Parliament (MP) to use the cost for a bare tunnel to compare with a complete MRT project in order to publicly allege that the MRT SBK project costs more than double.

“Why would someone want to compare a tunnel with a complete MRT project?” it said in a statement.

It then challenged Rafizi to address the information it has cited in response to his allegations, rather than attack naysayers as “cybertroopers”.