An ailing Malaysian sultan was under tight police security at a hospital yesterday after one of his palace guards was shot under mysterious circumstances amid a rare royal power struggle.
A feud between the sons of Sultan Tengku Ismail Petra, the constitutional ruler of northern Kelantan state, has thrown one of the country’s most prominent royal families into disarray and provided an unprecedented glimpse into behind-the-scenes palace intrigue.
The sultan has not spoken in public since the middle of last year because of heart problems that kept him hospitalized in Singapore for several months. He returned to Kelantan in February, but his condition remains a subject of deep speculation.
Tengku Muhammad Faris Petra, the state’s crown prince, ordered police late on Wednesday to step up vigilance at a Kelantan hospital where the 60-year-old sultan is receiving treatment, according to a palace statement.
A palace official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of administrative protocol, said the measure was prompted by “several incidents” in the past week, including a murder attempt on a palace guard who is in intensive care for severe chest wounds after being shot four times by an unknown assailant while returning from work.
Faris’ younger brother, Tengku Muhammad Fakhry, was questioned by police after the shooting, but authorities have not said whether they believe he was connected to it.
Faris, 40, is embroiled in a feud with Fakhry. He removed Fakhry in September last year from the state’s powerful Council of Succession, which determines who ascends to the throne.
State authorities apparently loyal to Faris prevented Fakhry from having the sultan sent back to Singapore for further treatment earlier this week, local news reports said without citing sources.
Fakhry’s representatives have indicated they believe the sultan is being held against his will at the Kelantan hospital.
Sultans and rajas are the hereditary titular heads in nine of Malaysia’s 13 states.
The royalty have mainly ceremonial responsibilities but command respect among the ethnic Malay Muslim majority, and it is rare for their disputes to spill open in public.
Kelantan has been the exception since last year, when a teenage Indonesian socialite married to the 31-year-old Fakhry fled to her home country, claiming her husband had tortured her.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS