New moves in Garuda poisoned flyer mystery
JAKARTA: Reports in the Jakarta Post indicate that police in Indonesia may be about to lay fresh charges against those suspected of poisoning a political activist on a Garuda flight to Amsterdam in September 2004.
Indonesia’s national police chief Gen. Sutanto said that the new suspects were former officials from national airline Garuda Indonesia.
“They are officials from Garuda with initials IS and R,” Sutanto told reporters at the Presidential Palace.
Munir Thalib , co-founder of human rights organisations Imparsial and Kontras, was found dead on a Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam via Singapore.
An autopsy conducted by Dutch authorities found excessive amounts of arsenic in his body, indicating that he was murdered on the one-hour leg of the flight from Jakarta to Singapore.
Munir was a critic of Indonesia’s military, accusing it of rights violations in the troubled provinces of Aceh and Papua and of running a network involved in illegal logging and drug smuggling.
Following his death, Munir’s widow reported receiving anonymous threats demanding she not implicate the military in her husband’s death.
Rights activists have recently speculated that new suspects in the case would come from the State Intelligence Agency (BIN).
The only person ever to be charged in the murder case was pilot Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto.
In October 2006, an Indonesia Supreme Court appeal cleared Pollycarpus of murder charges, leaving no one to be held accountable the murder of Munir.
Pollycarpus was an off-duty Garuda pilot on the same flight with Munir from Singapore to the Netherlands. He was the first to administer medical assistance to Munir when the effect of the poison took hold.
Ian Jarrett
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