Murder cases dropped for lack of evidence
JAKARTA (JP): A police source has said three big murder cases have been dropped for not meeting requirements for further processing.
The three cases lacked sufficient evidence to be submitted to the Prosecutors' Office for trial, the source said.
The source did not identify the cases, but said that all of them were murders which were headline news between 1993 and 1994.
The statement was made available to The Jakarta Post in reference to police efforts to "excavate" a number of unsolved cases.
On Friday, police reexamined an area in Ancol, North Jakarta, where a six-year-old girl was found dead in March last year. The body of Levina Dwisy was found near her bicycle. She had been strangled.
The North Jakarta police chief, Lt. Col. Abu Bakar Hanifah, who led the team on Friday said, "We are just trying to reexamine the scene".
The Jakarta detectives said they hoped to get new clues to help them find the real culprits of all the unsolved cases. "We will not merely depend on statements made by witnesses or suspects."
However, no significant progress has been made so far, Hanifah told the Post. The death of the kindergarten student, who was looking for her parents at the time, still remains a mystery.
Investigation
The city police spokesman denied that police had yet to make progress.
"We will announce everything only after we finish the investigation," Lt. Col. Iman Haryatna said over the weekend.
"What we do now is to keep trying to solve all of the (pending) cases," he said.
But a police source said that difficulties in reexamining the case were also due to complicated bureaucratic procedures where all police offices want to probe the murder.
"Besides the shortage of scientific evidence, there were too many personnel of different offices questioning witnesses without filing reports," said the source, who asked for anonymity.
The city police have recorded significant progress in the investigation of the brutal murder of the six members of the Hutagalung family in Bekasi.
They sent several pieces of evidence to Malaysia where a suspect is in police custody.
However, there is strong doubt among the detectives about whether they can solve the case due to a lack of scientific evidence at the scene of the crime.
Other criminal cases handled by the city police have yet to show any valuable progress. It is particularly due to the incorrect way of investigating the scene of the crime at the beginning.
The other reasons are the difficult situation in probing cases, such as a lack of independent eyewitnesses. (bsr)