The government must conduct an open inquiry into the November 8 Klang shoot out incident which caused 5 deaths

Five Indians who were suspected robbers were killed in a shoot out with the Police in Klang at 12.30am Sunday, November 8.

It was reported that the five were former inmates of the Simpang Renggam detention centre and that they were involved in at least 10 robberies in Selangor and the Klang Valley for the past one year.

In the wake of outcry over the shooting, Federal CID chief Datuk Mohd Bakri Zinin denied that police had used indiscriminate force in the shoot out.

But this was not the first case where people were killed in shoot out with police . Media reports say that last year , there were 39 deaths after shoot out with police.

Although the Police has the right to shoot in self defence, there has been increasing public allegation that the police are trigger happy and do adopt a shoot to kill approach .

The above incident on November 8 has undoubtedly strengthened such allegation despite strong denial by the police

The attempted suicide by R Seetha who poured weedkiller for herself and her four children after being overcome with grief by her brother's death shows how traumatized families of shoot our victims could be. Seetha's brother Surenden was one of the five killed in the shoot out.

Surenden's father, R. Rampathy has disputed police claims that his son was a criminal.He even claimed that his son did not have a police report, had never been arrested or even set foot in a police station.

Public allegation cannot be taken lightly. The police should know that public allegation cannot be dispelled merely by a denial

The first thing that the police must not do is to complicate the issue by claiming that no one cares when a police officer dies in a shoot out. This is totally baseless.

The second thing that the police should do is to publish the criminal activities and records of the five suspected robbers

But the most important thing is that the government must conduct an open inquiry into the above shoot out deaths .

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