KUALA LUMPUR, July 18 — Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman expressed young Malaysians’ “disgust” with the prolonged sex video scandal encompassing PKR members, saying attention spent on the episode could be put to better use.

He urged the nation’s youth to turn away from the escalating scandal and political gossip, saying they should redirect their focus to their personal work and contributions to the country’s progress.

“Our time that is ‘stolen’ by the sex scandal and cheap politics is time that we ‘owe’ to building a progressive Malaysia.

“The youth are disgusted,” he wrote on Twitter.

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The sex video scandal allegedly implicating PKR deputy president Datuk Seri Azmin Ali caused factionalism in the party to openly erupt after president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim suggested the former should quit as economic affairs minister if the videos were genuine.

Azmin reacted angrily by telling Anwar to “look in the mirror” while 23 PKR central committee members and four of the party’s federal lawmakers issued a joint statement to publicly rebuke their party president for failing to defend his own deputy.

Police investigations into the sex videos are progressing and the law enforcement agency reportedly secured a four-day remand order for Anwar’s political secretary, Farhash Wafa Salvador Rizal Mubarak, who was among those detained for allegedly distributing the pornographic videos.

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Azmin’s accuser, former PKR Youth leader Haziq Abdullah Abdul Aziz, has also been remanded for investigations centred on Section 377B of the Penal Code for unnatural sex.

Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said yesterday that he considered the real crime in the scandal to be the conspiracy to “bring down Azmin.”