Indonesian court implicates intelligence agency in murder of human rights activist

Munir had earned the hatred of the security forces by exposing their crimes during the final years of the Suharto dictatorship and in Aceh and West Papua after the regime’s fall in 1998. He was the founder of two of the country’s best known human rights groups—the Indonesian Human Rights Monitor (Imparsial) and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontas). On September 7, 2004, he was poisoned with a massive dose of arsenic while travelling from Indonesia to the Netherlands, via Singapore, on Air Garuda flight GA974. Amid widespread suspicions of a state-organised assassination, Pollycarpus was arrested and charged with the crime. The police alleged that he had offered Munir his business class seat and then, with the assistance of two flight attendants, laced the activist’s orange juice with the poison.

In their verdict summary, the judges ruled that the Garuda pilot was central to the murder but rejected the prosecution case that only Pollycarpus and the attendants were involved. They declared that there “are other parties that must be found and further investigated by law enforcers”. The judges referred to dozens of phone calls made before and after Munir’s death between Pollycarpus and a cell phone owned by the then BIN deputy director and former military general Muchdi Purwopranjono. They stated that they “were of the opinion that an understanding has been reached between the defendant and the phone caller over the elimination of Munir’s life”.

The court’s decision provoked an immediate reaction from the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, himself a former top general. Two days after the verdict, presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng announced that Yudhoyono had ordered “all government institutions and all government officials” to cooperate with further police inquiries aimed at identifying who was behind the murder.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/indon-d30.shtml