4 November 2010
PETALING JAYA: Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein said that in an increasingly borderless world, human trafficking, terrorism and money-laundering are inter-linked with drugs and arms smuggling as well as cyber crime.
In his address to the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation symposium in Britain yesterday, he said these crimes were related to the movement of people including tourists, students and merchants.
“Globalisation acts as a fulcrum holding these bonds and the international community needs to formulate a new perspective to appreciate these linkages,” he said, adding that the different strands needed to be seen as “a single causal chain and not as exclusively distinct”.
In his address “Meeting the Security Challenge: A Malaysian Perspective”, he said human trafficking was a travesty of immense transnational proportions.
“It victimises the very citizens the state is meant to protect – specifically, the weak, the destitute and the defenceless, all for exploitative purposes.
“We note with great alarm that a third of all trafficking in women and children is in South-East Asia.
“Broad estimates suggest that annual cross-border trafficking incidents are as high as four million, with half originating in South Asia and South-East Asia,” he said, adding that it was caused by heartless profiteering.
Malaysia’s efforts against money-laundering and terrorism-financing, he added, would help identify organised criminals, block their illicit assets, weaken their organisation and neutralise threats to national security.
Hishammuddin also said that South Asia and South-East Asia were home to some of the “most notoriously radical religious fanatics”, adding that the threats were local and regional in character.
He spoke about the recent arrest of two suspected terrorists: an Indonesian who tried to smuggle 7,000 detonators from the southern Philippines through Malaysia to Medan, and a Malaysian believed to have links with Jemaah Islamiah Aceh with suspected links to al-Qaeda.
He welcomed closer cooperation with British authorities, including fostering more joint operations and strengthening collaborative research on transnational crime.
Full article here.
