Fake ship tickets found at Tanjung Priok port

JAKARTA (JP): The annual exodus of people heading home for the upcoming Idul Fitri and Christmas holidays was marred by the discovery of counterfeit ship tickets at Tanjung Priok seaport in North Jakarta on Wednesday.

Some 160 passengers of the Leuser, which was scheduled to set sail for Belinyu, on Bangka island, South Sumatra, had to disembark because they were holding fake tickets.

Tanjung Priok Seaport Police chief of detectives Sr. Insp. Hasyim said the fake tickets were first noticed by an official of state-owned shipping company PT Pelni, who saw that a ticketholder was about to board the ship.

"The ticket was similar to real ones but the official could see the difference right away," Hasyim told The Jakarta Post by phone.

After the first find, several officials conducted a check for more counterfeit tickets from passengers who had boarded the ship.

The officials later found that some 160 passengers were holding fake tickets and they immediately told them to disembark.

"The holders of fake tickets turned out to be high school and university students from Bandung, West Java, who were heading home to Bangka island," Hasyim said, adding that the students did not know that their tickets were not real.

Passenger Doni S. Firman, who coordinated the purchase of the tickets, told officials that he had bought the tickets from a man named Joko Sutarno, who lived in Bandung.

Doni said he did not become suspicious when the scalper, whom he did not know for a long time, offered to find tickets for him.

Hasyim said police had yet to locate the scalper.

Hasyim added that after the students were questioned, they were transported to Bangka island on board the Tangiang.

"We don't want to keep them too long. We understand how they must feel," Hasyim said.

Several fake tickets were also reportedly found at Gambir railway station in Central Jakarta after conductors discovered that several passengers had the same seat numbers.

However, a public relations official at state-owned railway company PT Kereta Api Indonesia (PT KAI), Gatot Wibowo, denied that fake tickets were found at the station.

"It was only a technical problem that several passengers had purchased tickets with the same seat numbers," Gatot told the Post by phone.

Separately, some 12,000 traditional medicine vendors and their families left the capital on Wednesday on board 160 buses provided by PT Sido Muncul, a producer of jamu (traditional medicine). They headed for their homes in Kuningan, West Java; Cirebon, Tegal, Surakarta, Wonogiri and Banjarnegara in Central Java; and Kediri and Malang in East Java.

Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications Agum Gumelar, who attended the send-off, told the jamu vendors not to bring friends and relatives with them when they return to the capital.

People from outside Jakarta have been known to tell stories of success about life in the capital and their friends and relatives accompany them when they return to the capital after the holiday.

Similarly at the National Monument (Monas), Central Jakarta, some 3,000 street vendors from several areas in Greater Jakarta left the capital for their homes using 52 buses provided by cigarette company PT Bentoel.

In Bogor, several passengers complained that several bus operators had arbitrarily raised the fares.

While the government only allows bus operators to raise the fares by 25 percent during the holidays, several operators raise them by up to 50 percent.

A similar practice was found in Makassar, South Sulawesi, where the local administration instructed bus operators not to raise fares during the holiday season.

In contrast to the annual exodus in the capital, the number of people flocking to other places across the country did not show a large increase on Wednesday.

In Semarang, Central Java, the number of people arriving at Tawang and Poncol railway stations had not shown a significant increase.

"There is only a slight increase in the number of people arriving today at the stations," a public relations official at PT KAI in Semarang, Suprapto, said.

It was the same situation in Pekanbaru, Riau, and in Jambi.

In Padang, West Sumatra, some 2,000 police officers were on hand to anticipate an increase in crime ahead of next week's holiday. (jaw/28/41)