2456) MALAY MAIL – 20/12/15 – MUSLIM CONSUMERS GROUP SNIPS RACIAL LINK TO KOTARAYA ‘CHEATING’ INCIDENT
21 Dec 2015
Mohd Ali Baharom led a small group of ‘red shirted’ demonstrators outside Kotaraya last Friday, calling for a boycott of the shopping centre linking the case to unscrupulous Chinese traders. — Picture by Yusof Mat Isa
KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 20 — The furore over suspected unscrupulous traders at Kotaraya has nothing to do with race, the Muslim Consumers Association of Malaysia (PPIM) said today as it sought to douse flames lit by a self-professed Malay rights champion who demonstrated outside the city shopping centre last week.
PPIM special unit director Muhammad Yusuf Azmi said his group saw the incident purely as a violation of consumer rights that had nothing to do with ethnicity.
“We will definitely not link it to race, this is about cheating handphone traders at Kotaraya,” he told Malay Mail Online in a text message today on Whatsapp.
“Because the cheating in Kotaraya involves every race and also the foreigners. That was why we did not define the issue as a racial one,” he added.
The Kotaraya incident Muhammad Yusuf spoke of first surfaced online, over news that a man was lured into a shop there with an offer to buy four handphones for RM200 each, only to be detained against his will and later forced to withdraw money from an ATM to buy the lot for the jacked up price of RM10,000.
No mention was made of the ethnicity of the handphone merchants in the original posting in local website Siakapkeli.
However, a former soldier Mohd Ali Baharom led a small group of “red shirted” demonstrators outside Kotaraya last Friday, calling for a boycott of the shopping centre linking the case to unscrupulous Chinese traders in a reminder of his previous antics outside another city tech mall, Low Yat Plaza in July, which later turned into a racial brawl.
The controversial leader of the “red shirt” movement, better known as Ali Tinju, also called the government to train ethnic Chinese handphone traders to prevent future cases of cheating.
PPIM was among the earliest groups to distance a racial link in the Kotaraya case. In a previous statement, the Muslim consumer rights watchdog said it does not support anyone who sought to take advantage of the issue and linked it to race.
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