Report implicates Indonesian intelligence in murder of human rights activist

Munir died suddenly while on Air Garuda flight GA974 from Indonesia to Holland via Singapore. He became violently ill in the course of the flight and, despite being given treatment by a doctor, died two hours before the aircraft landed in Amsterdam. After a lengthy delay, the autopsy results released last November showed that Munir died of arsenic poisoning.

Munir was the founder of two of Indonesia’s best-known human rights groups—the Indonesian Human Rights Monitor (Imparsial) and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras). He also served on government bodies and had a reputation in Indonesia and abroad for being objective and fearless in exposing human rights abuses.

According to Indonesian police Brigadier-General Marsudhi Hanafi, head of the fact-finding commission, the body had evidence directly implicating BIN in Munir’s death. Despite BIN’s refusal to cooperate, the commission had obtained an internal document outlining murder on an aircraft as one of four possible means to kill Munir. Each scenario had been assigned to a separate BIN team to carry out the murder as the opportunity arose.

So far only three people have been arrested as suspects. These are off-duty Garuda pilot and suspected BIN operative Pollycarpus Budihari Priyato and two flight attendants, Oedi Irianto and Yeti Susmiyarti, all of whom were on flight GA974. Pollycarpus was instrumental in moving Munir from his economy class seat to a business class seat where police believe the arsenic was administered in a drink. Senior Garuda officials who falsified documents relating to Pollycarpus’s presence on the flight have not been arrested.

Hanafi said that Pollycarpus did not administer the poison but was part of the plot. Police were anxious to question two other people on the flight. One was former BIN operative and special forces colonel Bambang Irawan who was on the aircraft but not on the passenger list. The other was an Indonesian chemist who lives in the Netherlands and consults for an Indonesian firm. He sat next to Munir in business class.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/indo-j25.shtml