US experts confirmed Anwar as man in video, court told .

 US authorities have identified the man in the controversial sex video screened by “Datuk T” as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, a magistrate’s court was told this morning.

The point was raised in the facts of the case read out today after the “Datuk T” trio of Datuk Shazryl Eskay Abdullah, Tan Sri Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik and Datuk Shuib Lazim pleaded guilty to their involvement in the screening of the video on March 21.

Abdul Rahim was accused of abetting Shazryl and Shuib in “openly” screening the pornographic material featuring sex acts between a man and a woman at the Carcosa Seri Negara Hotel here on March 21. All three were slapped with fines under section 292 of the Penal Code.

“Results of the analysis by experts from Dartmouth College, Handover, New Hampshire in the US verified the authenticity of the video, that there was no tampering or any act of super-imposing and that it originated from a DVR camcorder taken from Datuk Shazryl,” deputy public prosecutor Kamalluddin Md Said said when reading the facts of the case this morning.

He explained that the police had also obtained a CCTV recording from an apartment in Ampang, where the sex acts took place, and confirmed that both Anwar and Shazryl had been at the lobby of the apartment building on February 21, the same day that the sex video was said to have been recorded.

“Experts from Dartmouth College also carried out a facial recognition analysis on the man in the video and found that it resembled Anwar Ibrahim,” said Kamalluddin.

Abdul Rahim’s lawyer Datuk Seri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, who also submitted on that point today, told reporters later that according to the experts’ report, they were 99.99 per cent certain that the man in the video is Anwar.

In the June 4 report, prepared by Professor Hany Farid and Professor Lorenzo Torresani, it was stated that the institution had studied a video from a camcorder in a room and copied to a thumbdrive, a video from a surveillance camera taken in a room and extracted directly from a DVR, a video from a second camcorder taken outside an elevator, 320 images of one person named as “Mr X”, 26 images of one person named as “Mr Y” and 4,423 images of “Malaysian people”.

The report concluded that based on the study, “Mr X” is the same man in pictures provided to them by the local authorities, which were of Anwar.

“The conclusion states very clearly that Mr X is Anwar. They cannot say directly that Mr X is Anwar because they do not know him, but they concluded that it is 99.99 per cent certain from their facial recognition analysis that the man in the video is the same as the man in the pictures (of Anwar) shown to them,” said Shafee.

As such, he told the court that Anwar should be charged under sections 192, 193 or 199 of the Penal Code for lodging a false report, denying his identity in the video.

In court earlier, the trio’s counsel took pains to list down their clients’ credentials to prove their credibility as upstanding Malaysians.

The court also screened the 21-minute recording to ensure that the evidence had not been tampered with but magistrate Aizatul Akmal Maharani ordered the pornographic portions to be fast-forwarded.

In appealing for a lenient sentence for Abdul Rahim, Shafee pointed out that the latter was a first-time offender, that he had not caused any injury, his action was not for the purpose of obtaining profit and was in fact more for “public benefit”.

“We cannot let these men leave here thinking that justice was not served. We must show that justice has been done. Use your discretion wisely to look at their three cases here, in particularly my client, who only came in to assist in securing the room in Carcosa.

“He was driven by compassion to expose probably the biggest fraud in Malaysia,” he said.

Shazryl’s lawyer Mohd Zamani Ibrahim agreed with his colleague’s submission, saying that his client had even performed the “sumpah laknat” to prove that he was not lying.

“Until today, Anwar has not responded. What he did was for public good,” he said, adding that Shazryl was also a close associate of Anwar’s since 1996.

Lawyer Suhaimi Salleh, arguing for Shuib, appealed for a light sentence for his client, saying that by pleading guilty the latter had saved time and money. He also said that Shuib is a pensioner, a senior citizen and a diabetic.

Dato Anwar