KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 4 \u2014 Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail today confirmed only rank-and-file servicemen were involved in the scandalous theft of the two F-5E jet engines two years ago, saying they would be prosecuted soon.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s top lawyer also said no effort will be spared to recover the two G J85-21A turbojet engines found missing from the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) Sungei Besi base in 2007, adding the government will seek help from foreign authorities.<\/p>\n
The theft of the two engines \u2014 each worth RM50 million \u2014 became public only after it was exposed by a local newspaper last month.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak\u2019s response that investigations were ongoing after two years had immediately attracted charges of a cover-up from opposition politicians.<\/p>\n
Government officials have declined to identify the cargo\u2019s destination, but Western diplomats closely tracking the situation said that the engines were destined for Iran, which has been under a US trade embargo since 1995 and is now under global scrutiny because of its refusal to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme. The police later said the engines are allegedly in Argentina.<\/p>\n
RMAF officials said they can still operate its fleet of F-5Es despite the loss of the 30-year-old technology engines, said to be spares kept in Sungei Besi despite the F-5E squadron is based in the RMAF Butterworth airbase.<\/p>\n
Malaysia bought the 14 F-5Es in 1974 and decommissioned them in 1999.<\/p>\n
One crashed in the Malacca Strait near Perak on May 31, 1995. There are 13 now but only six are operational after they came back to service in 2003.-MalaysianInsider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 4 \u2014 Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail today confirmed only rank-and-file servicemen were involved in the scandalous theft of the two F-5E jet engines two years ago, saying they would be prosecuted soon. The country\u2019s top lawyer also said no effort will be spared to recover the two G J85-21A turbojet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"better_featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buletinonlines.net\/v7\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}