CSI ace who worked Malaysia’s biggest murder cases
Published on: Saturday, August 13, 2022
By:
FMT, Faisal Asyraf
Amidon Anan, 71, now teaches forensics at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Mara.
PETALING JAYA: For 32 years, it was Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) expert Amidon Anan’s job to find answers, but more often than not he’d find himself asking one question over and over again.
“How would I feel if someone close to me was murdered?”
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It was this question that strengthened his resolve to do his best as a police investigator to bring a criminal to justice.
One sight he would never forget was that of a woman in her 50s who was brutally raped and murdered after a robbery.
“The robber not only took her belongings but raped her as well. He mutilated her private parts,” he said.
In his time in the police force, Amidon handled close to 40,000 cases.
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“Whenever I saw the bodies of murder victims, especially those of women and children, I would shed tears. I made it my mission to seek justice for them,” said Amidon, who served at the federal police headquarters in Bukit Aman.
He often carried out investigations at three different crime scenes a day in search of evidence and leads.
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To seek clues, Amidon would try to get into the mind of the perpetrators, from the moment he arrived at a crime scene.
“When you enter the crime scene, you stop at the entrance, take a deep breath, and look around. With every step, you scan the surroundings, and you will get plenty of information.
“You walk from the front to the back door and back. Bad people usually don’t rush to their target. They assess their surroundings,” he said, adding this insight helped narrow the area where items of evidence might be lying around.
Among the big cases Amidon handled were the murders of Canny Ong (2003), Altantuya Shaariibuu (2006) and the rape-murders of Suzaily Mokhtar (2000) and eight-year-old Nurin Jazlin (2007).
He also helped in the hunt for the notorious Gang Mamak that pulled off a RM12 million gold bar heist at Subang airport in the early 1990s.
“Actually, it was the Gang Mamak case that led the police to form a dedicated CSI unit after they linked several robbery cases across the nation to that group,” he said.
Although he retired in 2008, Amidon remains active by teaching forensics at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM).
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