Malaysian police Wednesday vowed to detain rumor-mongers without trial and threatened sedition charges against opposition leaders who question the official death toll after the country's worst ethnic clashes in decades.
Authorities announced plans to build 5,000 low-cost homes to rehouse squatters in the run-down district near the capital where four days of clashes between Malays and ethnic Indians began on March 8.
Police say six people died, 23 are still in hospital and 220 people were arrested after the bloodshed in the Taman Medan district of Petaling Jaya town.
"We will resort to ISA (the Internal Security Act) on rumor-mongers," Selangor state police chief Nik Ismail Nik Yusuf told a press conference.
The act allows indefinite detention without trial.
The police chief said life was "almost back to normal" in Taman Medan and police numbers of 700-800 would be trimmed within a week if it stayed calm.
Leaders of the four-party opposition Alternative Front, in a statement Monday, had said that based on family and hospital sources, "we fear that the actual number of deaths is greater than the official figure announced by police."
But Nik Ismail said the claims were "an effort to scare people and to give wrong information."
Wednesday's Star newspaper said five of the dead were Indians and one was an Indonesian.
Nik Ismail said members of the National Justice Party and the Parti Islam SeMalaysia, two of the Alternative Front parties, visited the area Tuesday evening and distributed pamphlets questioning official casualty figures.
"We will lodge a police report today on the false claims and we will investigate under the Sedition Act," he said.
The report would be lodged "against all parties who accuse us of not being truthful in our reporting," Nik Ismail added.
"We are always transparent...there is no need for us to hide or not give accurate details."
Sedition is punishable by up to three years' jail.
Opposition parties, some residents and non-governmental organizations have criticized police for acting too slowly to stamp out violence despite a heavily armed presence on the ground.
They have also said there are reports that police in isolated cases failed to act impartially. The police force is overwhelmingly Malay.
Nik Ismail denied the suggestions. "We are very professional in our job... we are very impartial and we do not side with anybody," he said.
Of the 220 people arrested, 167 including five soldiers were still being held. There are 98 Malays, 57 Indians and 12 Indonesian illegal immigrants.
They face a variety of charges including murder.
Racial unrest has been rare since traumatic Malay-Chinese riots in 1969.
The immediate cause was a trivial neighborhood quarrel -- a Malay wedding party which blocked a road and a later incident on March 8 when children playing with catapults broke a van windscreen.
But both government and opposition supporters also highlighted social problems -- poverty, unemployment, poor housing and gangsterism -- in the squatter settlements and other villages adjoining leafy, middle-class Petaling Jaya.
Late Tuesday Selangor's chief minister Mohamed Khir Toyo said the state government would build 5,000 new homes in the area, which had some 6,000 squatter families.
"The area has all the chemistry for trouble," said Mohammad Agus Yusoff, political science lecturer at the National University.
"It lacks infrastructure and consists of poor uneducated people who have been isolated and kept out of the political and economic mainstream all this while," he told AFP.
The clashes did not reflect overall ethnic relations, he said.
"It did not start as an ethnic clash but erupted into one because residents there were marginalized and there is a latent dissatisfaction." -- KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)
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