SUNGAI BULOH, Jan 24 — Taking its cue from the police, the operator of the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) today said it plans to introduce an application where the public can report suspicious activities around its rail lines to prevent theft and possible loss of life.
The initiative, dubbed “RakanMRT”, is loosely based on the “RakanCOP” app rolled out in 2017 to curb crime.
“It’s a tough task to monitor the tracks as well as these thieves who are very creative. They can use any of the 1,100 poles throughout the 41km elevated tracks to access the train tracks and steal the cables.
“Hence, we are planning to do something like ‘RakanCOP’ where the public can assist with apprehending criminals,” RapidKL Sdn Bhd CEO Khairani Mohamad told a news conference at the Sungai Buloh MRT Depot here.
“The MRT line is the people’s line and we want them to take ownership of it and to assist us with catching and preventing these cases from happening in the future,” he added.
Khairani said MRT has 158 auxiliary police who patrol the 51km Sungai Buloh-Kajang (SBK) Line round the clock. They are split into three groups and work an eight-hour shift each. However, their priority is public safety and crimes, like sexual harassment, apart from theft and disruption to public property.
He added that while there are cameras at all MRT stations, there aren’t enough on the tracks as the cost incurred would be exorbitant.
Khairani said the auxiliary police are working closely with local authorities to find a way to collaborate and disseminate information in a timely and accurate fashion.
In its two years of operations as well as during construction, RapidKL has lost an estimated RM5 million to RM6 million worth of copper cables along the SBK line to thieves.
The latest attempted theft happened yesterday at the stretch between Pusat Damansara and Phileo Damansara, but was foiled when the suspected perpetrator was arrested.
However, the MRT trains were halted for over an hour between 9.45am and 10.36am.
“The damage from yesterday was minimal but since our construction period till today, which I’d say is around two years, we have made losses of around RM5 million to RM6 million,” said Azmi Mat Zin, the CEO for the MRT SBK Line.
“We’ve had eight reported cases since last year and there were those that we haven’t been able to catch. These thieves are after the land or earth cables as the other cable has 75kW of power running through it. If you touch this, it’s fatal,” he stressed.
A normal household power socket has 240 volts or 2.4kW.
According to RapidKL, the would-be thief was a 45-year-old Malaysian who climbed a 10-metre makeshift wooden ladder near Kelab Golf Perkhidmatan Awam in Bukit Kiara and was caught crawling under the power lines after the intruder alert system with the code “red tango” was activated at 9.51am.
MRT’s auxiliary police found a cutter and pieces of copper cable on the man who has since been handed over to the police.
Short turn-back trains were immediately called from Sungai Buloh to Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI) station and between Kajang to Cochrane stations.
Shuttle buses were dispatched between the TTDI and Muzium stations as well between the Cochrane and Muzium stations to ferry commuters stranded during the temporary MRT train shutdown.
