Skip to main content

Indonesia military chief arrested for murder


THE former head of the Indonesian military's special forces and deputy head of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) has been arrested for the murder of the country's leading human rights activist. Major-General Muchdi Purwopranjono surrendered to police in Jakarta last night and was charged with the premeditated murder of Munir Thalib.
The poisoning of Mr Munir on a flight to Amsterdam in 2004 has been Indonesia's most controversial crime, with allegations the murder was sanctioned at the highest level, dogging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.Mr Munir angered Indonesia's military and intelligence elite by exposing widespread corruption and human rights abuses in the provinces of Aceh and Papua.

At the time of the murder, Muchdi was the deputy director of BIN, responsible for covert operations.Police spokesman Abubakar Nataprawira said Muchdi, now retired, was being held in police custody.He revealed a warrant had been issued for his arrest several days ago, but the former Kopassus commander decided to surrender yesterday.The arrest is likely to send a shockwave through Indonesia's corridors of power but will be applauded by human rights organisations, which have described the killing and subsequent cover-ups as one of the blackest marks on Indonesia's reputation.Mr Munir was poisoned with arsenic during a transit stopover in Singapore, dying in agony during the flight.

A Garuda employee was allegedly seen providing Mr Munir with a drink in an airport coffee shop.Several investigations into the killing were abandoned, despite the conviction of Garuda Airlines pilot and alleged BIN agent Pollycarpus Priyanto for the murder.In December 2005 Pollycarpus was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. But in October 2006, his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, citing insufficient evidence.The Supreme Court then re-opened the case for a judicial review and he was sentenced again in January this year, this time to 20 yearsBIN denied any links to Pollycarpus or the murder.

Investigators had revealed that 41 telephone calls between Pollycarpus and Muchdi's phone around the time of Mr Munir's murder.Muchdi claimed ignorance of the calls.A fresh investigation ordered by Dr Yudhoyono this year revealed a "smoking gun", with BIN agent Budi Santoso Najubg making a sworn statement that he helped Pollycarpus draft a letter to the head of the national airline Garuda, ordering he be assigned to security duties.The letter enabled Pollycarpus to board the flight to Amsterdam alongside Mr Munir."I was often ordered by Muchdi to check on where Pollycarpus was," said Mr Santoso, who was then an operations director with BIN.He also delivered several thousand dollars from Muchdi to Pollycarpus before and after Mr Munir's murder.The assignment letter was to be signed by BIN's deputy chief Mohammad As'ad, according to Mr Santoso.He also said that Pollycarpus was part of BIN's "network" and in regular contact with General Muchdi.Human rights groups have said that the evidence proved BIN officials had perjured themselves in several court hearings, but were despairing about the failure to charge more senior officials for their role in the murder.

The former head of Garuda airline was sentenced to a year's jail in January this year for helping in the murder of Mr Thalib.Indra Setiawan had confessed to assigning Pollycarpus to security duties, which enabled him to board the flight to Amsterdam alongside Mr Munir.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greenpeace boycott Palm oil products Duta Palma

Environmental organization Greenpeace India has demanded that all Indian palm oil importers and corporate consumers immediately stop palm oil sourcing from Indonesian companies like Duta Palma who make palm oil by destroying forests and tiger habitat in Indonesia. An investigative report issued by Greenpeace Indonesia released on Thursday links India's growing palm oil imports and corporate apathy to Duta Palma's destruction of hundreds of acres of Indonesian rainforests and tiger habitat in complete disregard of Indonesian government&# 39;s moratorium on such activities in the rainforest. Big Indian corporates like Ruchi Soya, Adani -Wilmar, Godrej Industries, Parle, Britannia are among many who use Indonesian palm oil in their products on a large scale.  "Duta Palma's dirty oil could well be entering into their supply chains. Yet, so far, no Indian company has taken any visible steps to clean up their supply chain, to delink their brands from the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...
Post a Comment
Read more