COMMENT | Don't wait till your loved one is abducted

COMMENT | Tomorrow, Feb 13, will be four years since pastor Raymond Koh, the founder of the NGO called Komuniti Harapan, was abducted in broad daylight, on a busy road in Petaling Jaya.

The kidnapping was shocking in itself, but equally maddening is that in the run-up to the fourth anniversary of his abduction, many Malaysians appear to be unaware that such an audacious abduction had taken place.

Some Malaysians told me that the abduction had nothing to do with them. This is where they are wrong. The abduction has everything to do with them.

Koh's disappearance is a reflection of what is happening in Malaysia. The nation has degenerated into a tangled web of controversy, denials, cover-ups, incompetence and the determination of the state to repress its own citizens.

The questions some Malaysians posed ranged from, "Who is he?", "He must have done something wrong", "I didn't read about him in the Malay papers" to "I don't keep up with the news because there are more interesting articles about food".

Susanna, Koh's wife, has not received any updates on the investigation into her husband's disappearance. She is not alone.

Cast your mind back to February 2017 and try and recall that soon after Koh's disappearance, we read that three other people had been declared missing.

They were Pastor Joshua Hilmy and his Indonesian wife, Ruth, and Amri Che Mat, a social activist from Perlis. They disappeared within four months of one another.

Delving into their backgrounds will reveal the common thread that links these four disappearances. It is...