Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was hit with criminal charges Tuesday for his part in an election reform rally, a case he denounced as another government attempt to remove him from politics. Anwar and two party colleagues were charged with violating a controversial new law governing public gatherings and a court order that banned the April 28 rally from the centre of the capital Kuala Lumpur. The charge comes just four months after Anwar was acquitted of sodomy in a long-running trial that the charismatic leader has said was engineered by the government of Prime Minister Najib Razak to remove him as a political threat. “We will fight. This is political intimidation,” the 64-year-old Anwar told reporters as he left the court in Kuala Lumpur after pleading not guilty. “Najib is afraid to face me in elections. I want to tell Najib not to use the courts and the flawed (assembly) law passed in parliament to intimidate political opponents.”
