Iqbal Fadil, Jakarta – The murder of human rights activist Munir will never be solved. This is because the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) and the national police are holding all of the respective facts and will never reveal them.
“I am certain they will never be revealed. The police have a trump card, BIN has a trump hard. So it will simply end like this”, said House of Representatives Commission III member from the National Mandate Party fraction, Djoko Edi Abdurrahman, during a break in a Commission III working meeting with the chief of the Criminal Investigation Agency in Jakarta on Tuesday February 14.
According to Abdurrahman, there were no meaningful developments in the case of Munir’s death that were conveyed by chief of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Police Commissioner General Makbul Padmanegara. Police are still having difficulties obtaining additional evidence to develop the case.
Even a recording of the phone conversation between Pollycarpus and BIN has yet to be obtained. This is despite the fact that this recording could provide a clue to the identity of the principle actor or mastermind behind the murder. “The response given by the chief of criminal investigation agency is that there has been no progress from earlier findings. [The police are] just running round in circles”, complained Abdurrahman.
What is interesting is that all of the members of Commission III – including Abdurrahman – have asked that Pollycarpus, who was jailed for 14 years for the murder, be released immediately. This is because the sentence handed down was only based on the convictions of the judges – not based on the facts revealed during the court hearings.
“If it is [left] like this it will become a bad precedent for the legal system. If [a cases] is not proven and the evidence is not strong enough release [then the defendant]. Better to release 1000 guilty people that to punish one person who is innocent”, said Abdurrahman.
Abdurrahman, who is also a member of the Munir case monitoring team, believes that solving the case should not be merely to improve the popularity of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; in order that he be seen as a president that cares about human rights, or that the national police are capable of accomplishing something or judges that are capable of handing down [a just] sentence. “It shouldn’t be like that. This legal case concerns the life of person. This need to be corrected”, he asserted.
Abdurrahman proposed that the police be more creative and work even harder to find what other possibilities there are for the motive for the murder. Not just be fixated on existing theories and facts. However he is pessimistic that police will do this. “[The police] must look beyond the fried noodles and orange juice glass theory that would make it possible for us to arrive at the actor behind the murder”, he said. (ddn)
[Translated by James Balowski.]
