No error in handling Kotagede boy: Police

JAKARTA (JP): Police yesterday said there had been no procedural errors in their handling of a nine-year-old boy whom they held for 52 days, including one week in an adult prison in Yogyakarta, in connection with a petty theft.

Maj. Gen. Mangatar Bilang Hutagalung, the deputy for operational affairs of the national police, said the boy had been held for the extended period because neither of his parents had been willing to take him.

A child protection agency had sent the boy back to the police because it did not have the facilities to accommodate him, Hutagalung said.

The boy became headline news last week after it became known that he had been kept in the Wirogunan prison in Yogyakarta.

It was Permadi Satrio Wiwoho, the controversial mystic who is in Wirogunan awaiting trial on charges of blasphemy, who raised the alarm about the presence of the boy in the jail.

Officials at the ministry of justice, which administers prisons, have blamed the police and the prosecutors' office for the incident, saying that the boy should never have been detained in the first place. They have said that the administrators of Wirogunan could not refuse to take the boy when the prosecutor's office sent him there.

The boy, who is in the third grade of elementary school in the Kotagede subdistrict in of Yogyakarta, was detained in late April after he allegedly tried to steal a caged bird worth Rp 4,000 ($1.70). He was detained at the police precinct for 45 days, after which he was transferred to Wirogunan, where he spent seven days before finally being released. The boy was never charged.

Hutagalung said the boy had committed offenses in the past. "There have been at least eight occasions on which he tried to steal birds from houses in the neighborhood."

He said the boy came from a broken home. "His parents divorced three years ago and each has since remarried."

The Kotagede police precinct had approached his parents at least four times, asking them to take the child, Hutagalung said. "They said they couldn't, and they even signed a statement to that effect," he added.

Police later turned to Bispa, a counseling agency for children and families in Yogyakarta, but they only kept the boy for five days, after which they returned him to the precinct because they did not have the facilities to accommodate the boy.

Hutagalung said the report from the Kotagede precinct showed that while in police detention the boy had been free to roam around the precinct's yard during the day. He had been required to spend nights in the cell, however.

"On the basis of the reports we have received, we have found no violations of procedure," he said.

The boy is now reportedly in the care of his grandmother. There are no reports or indications that he was abused during his incarceration.

Hutagalung said that, in the absence of legislation dealing with juvenile delinquents, all criminal cases involving children would, necessarily, continue to be dealt with under the general Criminal Code.

He said the police would support any plan to enact a special law on child delinquency and to establish juvenile detention centers to house children like the Kotagede boy. (bsr/emb)