The British based blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin (RPK) is currently the champion of the present Prime Minister and his profligate wife.

He no longer implies they were implicated in the cover up of the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu, for example, and now attacks anyone who queries the conduct of 1MDB or any other related corruption issues.

It is a transformation from his earlier incarnation as a hero of the liberal opposition and supporter of freedom of speech, but ‘needs must’ it would appear and RPK’s earlier financial problems are clearly resolved – his new BMW speaks for itself.

RPK has nonetheless recently accused Sarawak Report of having ‘moved’ to a ‘luxury new home’ and to be ‘living the life-style’ of the jet-setters he considers to be ‘under attack’ from this blog.

All this he personally knows to be untrue. However, he has indeed from time to time received uncanny information about who Sarawak Report might be meeting and when.

How come?

Surprises in Australia

Light has potentially been thrown on RPK’s information gathering technique by a strange episode recently in Australia.

Lawyers handling matters for the high-profile extradition case involving murder suspect Sirul Azhar Umah (one of Najib Razak’s two body-guards who were convicted of an allegedly motiveless murder of Altantuya) had a shock last month.

One member of Sirul’s legal team had sent an email message to another, according to sources, who then attempted to reply on matters relating to the bodyguard’s strictly private legal information.

However, instead of a normal automated reply, a strange email address popped up in the ‘return-to’ address box – that address was [email protected].

Neither party had ever heard of Malaysia Today nor corresponded with this email address ever before.

This is what the lawyer who experienced the surprise intercept then wrote to his colleague:

“I was about to email you a reply and clicked on the reply button and began typing and was about to send when I saw that the email address was as below.  This tells me you have some Malware, which is reading all of your comms. You may need to have an IT expert to clean up your systems”

The colleague, SR is reliably informed, did as advised and it was confirmed by experts that his systems had been compromised by a computer ‘bug’ of the sort that diverts emails.

However, all sides were left initially mystified as to whom this unknown address could actually belong?

Not for long.

The Australian lawyers conducted researches, which soon unearthed the owner of this email address of ‘piranha’@malaysiatoday.  It is none other than one of the contact addresses of RPK’s own blog Malaysia Today.

Gosh!

Sarawak Report has requested an explanation from RPK (at his last known private email address). No response.

Perhaps our article will elicit a more formal reply from the blogger, who has developed into our most passionate critic over past months?

Maybe RPK has an explanation for this frankly creepy coincidence that two lawyers from Australia, who are dealing with a client of major interest in a case that was once RPK’s cause celebre, should find his email pop up in their malware?

Neither of these legal eagles had previously ever heard of RPK, corresponded with him or cared about him, after all.

How come his address was embedded therefore in their reply box about Sirul?

Enquiries have now revealed that the Australian immigration services, who are holding Sirul, have also acknowledged that their email correspondence has come under attack relating to this particular case.

There has surely to be an explanation, apart from hacking, which is what tends to come to mind?

Recent hacking against Sarawak Report

This incident ties in strangely with some rather amateur hacking attempts against Sarawak Report during exactly the same period in recent weeks.

Sarawak Report has long been the target of high level Malaysian governmental surveillance. However some silly added attempts appeared almost exactly at the same time as the attacks on Sirul’s Australian team.

This attempted hack manifested in the form of emails ‘from your team at Google’ requiring Sarawak Report to impart passwords already known to Google. These requests were sent on a number of occasions by both email and text.

Checks have confirmed that these pleading emails were indeed, as suspected, false attempts to get access data for our computers – what a surprise.

One British professional told Sarawak Report:

“These attempts were amateurish, but these approaches do often work. It’s called phishing”.

We would be delighted to hear RPK’s denial of any involvement in these odd events, in particular the appearance of his email address in the return box for Sirul’s lawyers and the attempted hacking at the Australian immigration centre where the convicted murderer is being held.

Perhaps he has an explanation for why it all happened?