AKM Atiqur Rahman, who has been touring polling centres throughout the day, told bdnews24.com that he had not come across ‘a single such incident’.



He was in Johor Bahru, near the southern tip of mainland Malaysia, when the polls closed on Sunday.



“I have gone round quite a few centres today and everything appears to be quite in order,” the envoy said."There were no such complaints."



Reports , later dismissed as false, had surfaced that many expatriate Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia had been duped into believing they were indeed being made voters in Malaysia.



The NGO Affairs Bureau’s announcement, citing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said that many Bangladeshis working in Malaysia would not only be given citizenship but voting rights in these elections.



However, the Bangladesh envoy Atiqur Rahman clarified that no such announcement had ever been made.



According to a petition filed with the White House of USA , the ruling coalition —Barisan Nasional — “had bribed the official recruitment agency of Bangladesh to allow a huge number of Bangladeshi workers (estimated about 600,000 people) taken to Malaysia for such despicable and non democratic action”.



The petitioners , ‘Kuan-Ping Ang and etc’ , on the White House website’s open petition page have urged the Obama administration for assistance to prevent this supposed vote rigging by phantom voters.



Asked whether the High Commission had initiated any investigation to ascertain whether there is any truth in these allegations, the Bangladeshi envoy said there had been none. “But we may begin something to this effect later.”



Asked about the process of becoming a Malaysian voter, Rahman said, “There are perhaps 100 Bangladeshis or so who might have become citizens and thereafter voters.”



“It (voting rights) is very difficult and restricted,” said the diplomat. He said that there was no way such a huge number of people could actually secure citizenship, let alone a voter ID.



According to another High Commission official , since there were numerous complaints and worries about Bangladeshi workers, this hoax might have been engineered by certain quarters for political advantage.



He said voting rights were almost exclusively restricted to Malaysians and anyone foreigner who went up to a polling booth , even with a fake voter ID, would give himself away. “Any idiot would know that the person was a foreigner and not a Malaysian.”



Requesting anonymity this official told bdnews24.com that there were an estimated 600,000 Bangladeshis living in Malaysia. “That is including the officially registered people as well as illegal and semi-legal workers.”





Familiar to the region, the official said the highest number of workers were from Indonesia and put their number at around 1.5 million. If there are fake voters, it makes more sense to give them the false identity papers. “But here the complaints appear to be directed against Bangladeshis.”“I tried checking the situation after hearing these rumours but have not been able to spot a single such case.”He confirmed that the High commission had not taken any steps to probe these rumours. “We cannot do that unless it we are officially asked to.”