Ex-BIN official questioned over Munir poisoning
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
After months of stonewalling, the former secretary of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN), Nurhadi Djazuli, agreed on Monday to meet the government-sanctioned fact finding team investigating the murder of human rights campaigner Munir Said Thalib.
However, in an apparent setback for the team, the details of the questioning site and the substance of the questions look set to remain a secret.
Usman Hamid, a member of the fact-finding team, told The Jakarta Post by telephone that the meeting between the team and Nurhadi took place for two hours in Jakarta.
"The team has agreed not to expose the meeting location and its substance to the press for practical reasons during the next meetings.
"All team members threw questions to Nurhadi in line with his tasks and the official mechanisms in the intelligence institution. This first session was not directly linked with the Munir case," he said.
Hundreds of media representatives mobbed the Komnas Perempuan building in Menteng, Central Jakarta on Monday after rumors the questioning would be held there, however, Nurhadi and none of the team members were present.
Any private meeting in the other talked-about location; the media blacked-out BIN Headquarters in Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta; would have represented a victory for BIN officials who had pushed for any interrogation to take place there.
Nurhadi earlier resisted the fact-finding team's summons three consecutive times because he said the team had no authority to question him.
Nurhadi, who was recently appointed as the Indonesian Ambassador to Nigeria, was the main secretary of BIN when Munir died aboard a Garuda flight from Jakarta to the Netherlands on Sept. 7, last year.
Dutch authorities found excessive amounts of arsenic in his body. Some time later, police named pilot, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, stewardess Yeti Susmiyarti and flight attendant Oedi Irianto as the main suspects for Munir's murder by arsenic poisoning.
Pollycarpus was a Garuda security official who offered Munir a seat in business class, moving him from economy class, during the flight from Jakarta to Singapore. There is evidence suggesting Garuda management attempted to manufacture Pollycarpus' reason for being on that flight and other information suggesting he had worked as a BIN agent.
Usman, who is also coordinator of the National Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said his team planned to hold a second session with Nurhadi in the same location next week.
"The questions in the next session will be directed to examine any involvement of BIN in the fatal poisoning of Munir," he said.
Separately, Munir's wife, Suciwati, went on Monday to the National Police Headquarters to submit a report on terror threats made against her family, Usman and herself.
Suciwati, accompanied by her lawyer, Iskandar Sonhadji, said that she had recently received a unidentified handwritten letter, which threatened to abduct her, her children and Usman if they continued opposing "NKRI", the acronym for the unitary state of Indonesia, and supporting the investigation into her husband's murder.
The letter stamped on April 27 was sent from Ende, Flores, in East Nusa Tenggara.
The unnamed senders also said that they had readied Rp 250 million (US$26,315) to hire people to abduct and assault Suciwati and her family.
This is the second threat addressed to Munir's wife after she received a brown box filled with a severed chicken head, legs and intestines with a typed message saying "Do not connect the TNI to Munir's death. Want to end up like this?"
Suciwati said that she received the letter on May 4 and later decided to report it to the police. She was not alarmed by the letter, which had only hardened her resolve, she said.
"Since the threat is only in the form of a letter, Suciwati did not ask for police protection. She will ignore the threat and would encourage police investigators to work harder on this case," Iskandar said.