IPOH, Sept 28 — Police inquiries showed Tronoh assemblyman Paul Yong had raped his former Indonesian domestic helper, a senior investigating officer told the High Court here today.

ASP Yap Siew Cheng, from the Ipoh district police’s Criminal Investigation Department who was also the investigating officer (IO) for Yong’s rape case, said that she was certain that the accused had raped the victim based on her investigations.

“I do not agree that the victim was not raped, because my investigations determined that the victim was raped by the accused,” she testified during Yong’s rape trial at the High Court here.

Yap also said that her investigations were not one-sided and that she had approached the case from various angles, including recording witness statements, examining the alleged scene of the crime, and making checks with the relevant telco companies.

“I carried out my investigations until there were instructions to charge (the accused),” she said in reply to state deputy public prosecution director Azalina Rashdi.

Earlier, Yong’s lawyer Datuk Rajpal Singh suggested to Yap that his client had not raped the victim and that Yap had not conducted a thorough investigation, to which Yap disagreed.

Rajpal cited as an example the fact the victim was not sent for a mental evaluation despite a complaint made by the accused that he was being persecuted by the victim.

Yap replied that she did not refer the victim to a psychiatrist or mental health specialist as the medical report from the victim’s country of origin, Indonesia, before coming to work in Malaysia showed her mental state as normal.

Rajpal then said that the medical report prepared for foreign workers for work purposes did not involve proper mental evaluation but rather a general medical inspection.

He also said that the victim’s medical report from Indonesia could not be valid in this case as the check-up was done two-and-a-half months before the alleged rape took place.

Rajpal also asked whether Yap had contacted the doctor who conducted the check on the victim in Indonesia, to which Yap said she hadn’t.

He also asked Yap why the original bedsheet used on the day of the alleged rape incident was not seized, and a picture of a different bedsheet was taken instead.

Yap said that she only knew that the bedsheet, which was confiscated by the police, was not the original bedsheet after being informed by the victim.

Rajpal then suggested to Yap that the police seized the original bedsheet but did not send it for DNA analysis as it would clearly show the presence of a third person at the crime scene, apart from the accused and his family, to which Yap disagreed.

Meanwhile, Rajpal’s co-counsel Salim Bashir questioned Yap whether the victim had mentioned in her diary that she was sexually harassed or raped by her former employee.

Yap replied that nothing to that effect was found in the diary, which was in the police’s possession.

Yap also confirmed to Salim that the victim wrote a phrase in her diary on July 6, 2019, a day before the alleged rape, in her Indonesian dialect which translated to “wait and watch f***” in English.

As of today, a total of 23 witnesses, including the two main witnesses, the victim and the person who brought the victim to lodge a police report, have testified in court.

Judge Datuk Abdul Wahab Mohamed fixed October 29 for written submissions and November 16 for oral submissions by both parties.

Yong, 51, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of raping his Indonesian domestic helper at his house in Meru Desa Park on July 7, 2019 between 8.15pm and 9.15pm.

The case was mentioned in the Sessions Court but, on December 15 last year, the Federal Court allowed an application by the defence to transfer the case to the High Court.

The Tronoh assemblyman was first charged in the Sessions Court here on August 23, 2019, when he was the state Housing, Local Government, Public Transport, Non-Islamic Affairs and New Villages Committee chairman.