MIRI, MALAYSIA - Foreign and local non-governmental organisations or human rights groups that have information about sexual abuse by timber workers against interior Penan and native girls are urged to lodge police reports immediately.

State Police Commissioner Datuk Mohmad Salleh said police were prepared to launch an immediate investigation into the allegations.

'We need police reports to facilitate an immediate probe. NGOs or natives who know of such cases can lodge official reports at the nearest police station,' he told a press conference here.

'The Miri police have told me they have not received any report on such allegations.

'Sometimes, the problem with NGOs is that they highlight complaints through their websites and newspapers and on the Internet. They don't come to us (police).'

Mohmad, who was here on a working visit and to present donations to widows and orphans at the Miri police headquarters, was asked on the allegations circulating in cyberspace.

The allegations, highlighted by the Bruno Manser Foundation on its website, claimed that young Penan women and girls, including students, in Baram had been sexually abused by timber workers in logging camps and in their settlements.

The foundation cited a source from the Penan community,

The foundation, based in Switzerland, is an environmental and human rights grouping set up by environmental activist Bruno Manser, the Swiss who organised huge anti-logging protests among the nomadic and semi-nomadic Penans of interior Sarawak in the 1980s.

Manser later escaped from Sarawak and made his way back to Switzerland, where he set up the foundation.

In 2001, he was said to have managed to sneak into Sarawak again, but went missing during a trip into the deep forests.

It has been eight years since he was last spotted somewhere in interior Miri, when he purportedly tried to climb Batu Lawi to visit the Penans in the deep jungles near the Sarawak-Kalimantan border. He was never seen again.

Nonetheless, the foundation continues to highlight issues of concern about the Penans and natives of Sarawak through its website.

Mohmad said yesterday that the Sarawak police had faced difficulties before in probing claims by NGOs due to lack of information.

'We had previously investigated claims by NGOs that a certain native chief had been murdered in Belaga (central Sarawak), but we did not find any such evidence,' he said.

Asked if the Sarawak police could start a probe by using information from the Bruno Manser Foundation website, he said he must look at the contents of the website.

'Let us check what is contained in the website first. We will decide what to do next,' he said.

A large part of Baram district, and other parts of interior Sarawak, have been allocated to private consortiums for logging and plantation development. -- The Star