Gina 'comes home' to final resting place

Gina 'comes home' to final resting place

By K. Basrie

JAKARTA (JP): She finally came home.

The body of Gina Sutan Aswar, whose murder has stolen newspaper headlines for the past week, was flown home to Jakarta from Los Angeles yesterday, more than 25 months after she was reported missing by her family in Jakarta.

For the family, it was a tearful homecoming. But home she came, to her final resting place.

It was her father, 70-year old retired Air Force colonel Sutan Aswar, who showed most composure, fighting back his tears as the coffin containing Gina's remains was brought to his home on Jl. Cipinang Cempedak II in East Jakarta.

The other members of the family succumbed to hysterical cries.

"Gina, what happened to you, honey? What's up, darling?" cried one of her sisters, while the others were crying her name out, again and again.

The youngest daughter of Sutan Aswar and known by friends as bright and vibrant, Gina was identified by Los Angeles police in December, 1994, as one of the three victims whose decomposed bodies they had found in a storage locker in the city two months earlier.

Events have recently taken a new twist with the main suspect, Harnoko Dewanto, alias Oki, now in the custody of Jakarta police. Los Angeles police have named him as the main suspect in their investigation of the murder of Gina and the other two victims, one of whom is Oki's own brother. The third victim has been identified as a laundry businessman of Indian origins.

Police are holding 30-year old Oki on charges of falsifying a passport, but they have not ruled out investigating him in connection with the triple murder.

Gina had been missing since Nov. 1, 1992, after she boarded a Los Angeles-bound plane in Paris, where she had been vacationing at her sister's. Nothing had been heard of her since then, until the Los Angeles Police Department made its announcement last December.

Her elder brother, Syaiful Aswar, was the one sent to pick up her remains. They arrived aboard a Garuda Indonesia plane at Soekarno-Hatta airport just before 11 a.m. yesterday.

The coffin was immediately driven to the family home in Cipinang, where her family, relatives and friends were waiting.

The cloudy day and light drizzle accentuated the somber atmosphere.

After Friday prayers, and a prayers at the home, the body was taken to the Jeruk Purut cemetery in South Jakarta to be buried.

By this time, her family's anguished cries had petered out, as they began to accept the fate that had befallen their daughter. Atitje, one of her sisters, collapsed after the burial.

All the others were silent as they scattered flower petals over the mound.

Just as everyone was getting ready to leave, there was a last minute hitch as the family realized that the coffin had been buried the wrong way. Islam requires that coffins should face in the direction of the Ka'bah, the holy Moslem shrine in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

They had to dig up the coffin and bury it again.

There were dignitaries present at the burial ceremony, including former Air Force Chief of Staff Ashadi Tjahyadi, former National Police chief Awaluddin Djamin, Consulate General to Los Angeles R. Sudjono Haridadi and President Soeharto's daughter, Siti Hutami.

Gina's family is now pressing the Indonesian police to pursue the murder allegation. They were no longer insisting, as they had earlier, that Oki be sent to Los Angeles to face murder charges there.

Syaiful Aswar, Gina's brother, said the family was willing to provide various documents about her death and of that of the other two victims.

Their main concern was that justice be done, be it here or in Los Angeles, he said.

"If our police insist that Oki should be tried here, that's fine with us," Syaiful told The Jakarta Post.

Syaiful, who has traveled to Los Angeles several times during the last two years in search of his sister, said two Los Angeles police detectives would be coming to Jakarta soon to assist the investigation.

The National Police have ruled out extraditing Oki to the United States because there is no extradition treaty between the two countries. Meanwhile, the Attorney General's Office has confirmed that the law allows an Indonesian court to try one of its own citizens for crimes alleged to have been committed abroad.

Awaluddin Djamin, a retired police general who was present at the funeral yesterday, warned that there would be more difficult inherent to conduct the trial here.

"It would mean that the whole investigation process, including the forensic work, would have to start all over again," he said.

He noted that even in the absence of an extradition treaty, Los Angeles police could still request that Oki be brought to the United States.

"This is a unique case," he said.

Tisnaya I. Kartakusuma, a relative and lawyer for the family, told the Post that Jakarta police had asked to study Gina's remains at their forensic laboratory here.

"But we rejected their request because the forensic work has already been done by the American police," he said.