THE government does not plan to allow city residents to return to their hometowns for Ramadan under the movement control order (MCO), said Senior Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob.

“What we announced earlier was for those who are back in their hometowns and want to return to the cities to register themselves with the police,” the defence minister and National Security Council spokesman said today at a daily briefing on the MCO.

Ismail was clarifying a misunderstanding of a call for people to register with the police if they wished to travel interstate. The call had been taken to mean that people would be allowed to “balik kampung” for Ramadan, which begins tomorrow.

He said the government had wanted to know how many people intended to travel before deciding whether to allow such movements.

The call for would-be travellers to register with the police came following appeals to the government for help from people who had returned to their hometowns when the MCO came into effect and were now stuck there and wished to return to the city.

The government has recently announced a plan to allow the 100,000 students stranded on various campuses to go home. 

Unlike that plan, Ismail said it was difficult to coordinate the mass movements of people going back to their hometowns.

“The students, they have already been quarantined in the past month on campus. We know whether  they are sick or infected. But we don’t know whether those who want to go back to their hometowns are infected or not.

“Moreover, if they do go back they would be travelling in groups and that is prohibited under the MCO.”

The students could also be easily moved because the government had their data and knew where they were headed, he said.

It was not so with the general population who wished to travel interstate.

“For students, we can arrange for buses but we can’t do that for the other Malaysians who want to travel.”

The MCO came into effect on March 18 and is due to expire on April 28, but the government is still  studying whether it should be extended.

Meanwhile, there was a drop in MCO arrests yesterday, at 763 compared with 865 on Tuesday.

He said 115 were released on police bail and the rest remanded.

Police have so far arrested 18,948 people for MCO violations since March 18.

Security forces have set up 835 road blocks across the country, and inspected 581,942 vehicles passing through. – April 23, 2020.