IPOH, Nov 18 — After the High Court here gave the police a dressing down for their shoddy attempts at relocating M. Indira Gandhi’s youngest daughter, Prasana Diksa, Indira Gandhi Action Team (Ingat) chairman Arun Dorasamy today said it is time to reclassify her disappearance as a missing persons case.
Arun said the police are only looking for Indira’s ex-husband Muhammad Riduan Abdullah over his court absences.
“As a result, Interpol does consider this case as worth taking seriously.
“Reclassification to a missing persons case would prompt them to trace Muhammad Riduan and Prasana with greater effort and determination,” he told a press conference after meeting the case’s investigation officer at the Ipoh police district headquarters here.
The authorities reported that Muhammad Riduan fled the country in 2014 and his whereabouts are currently unknown.
Arun said that Ingat had previously lodged two police reports in Putrajaya in September 2019 and April 2020 to reclassify the case as that of a missing child.
“We don’t even know what happened to Prasana. No one has seen her alive since 2010.
“When I posed this question on the status of Prasana to the former inspector-general of police (IGP), he said maybe she could be alive,” he said.
He also said that he had specifically mentioned the name of Muhammad Riduan’s second wife as a person-of-interest in the reports lodged.
“We received information that Muhammad Riduan has been meeting his second wife, but the police have never called her for questioning nor taken any statement from her.
“Now she also can’t be located with her four children aged between three and 10.
“Instead, the police are asking us how we came to know of the second wife’s whereabouts.
“This is why we are so reluctant to share much information about this case with them. We receive information based on the goodwill of the public and we need to protect our sources,” he added.
Arun also said the promises made by the former IGP that there would be a happy ending and a win-win situation for both parties never materialised, and that he doubted it could ever happen following the lack of exhibits in the affidavits submitted during the judicial monitoring proceeding on Monday at the High Court here.
“We don’t even know what happened to the special task force that was set up to locate Muhammad Riduan and Prasana.
“And this is the first time that we found out there is an investigation officer for this case, and this is the first time that Indira and I had met the investigation officer,” he said.
Meanwhile, Indira said that today’s meeting with the investigation officer was not productive.
“We wanted to meet them so that we can cooperate with them. But the answer we received was that any matter pertaining to this case must be referred to Bukit Aman.
“As much as it is disappointing, we still hope the police will conduct a thorough investigation.
“Prasana is already 13 and she doesn’t have any legal documents, such as an identification card (IC), or any formal education, and the list goes on,” she said.
In 2014, the High Court issued a mandamus order compelling the police to search for, retrieve and reunite P. Prasana Diksa with her mother who last saw her when she was 18 months’ old.
The mandamus also compelled the police to enforce a committal order to arrest and commit Indira’s ex-husband, K. Pathmanathan, who now known by the Muslim name Muhammad Riduan Abdullah, to prison, which is still pending to date.
Muhammad Riduan embraced Islam in 2009 and unilaterally converted all three of his children with Indira on April 2 that year without their mother’s knowledge. They had been raised as Hindus all along.
Their two elder children, Tevi Darsiny, now 23, and Karan Dinish, now 22, stayed with Indira.
After a protracted, years-long court battle, the Federal Court ruled in January 2018 that the unilateral conversions of the children were unlawful.
Indira then filed a lawsuit last year claiming RM100 million from the IGP over his agency’s continued failure to execute a court order to reunite her with Prasana.
