'No proof of military's role in Marsinah murder'
'No proof of military's role in Marsinah murder'
JAKARTA (JP): East Java military chief Maj. Gen. Imam Utomo says there is no evidence that the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI) were involved in the 1993 murder of labor martyr Marsinah.
He said on Thursday that the police team assigned the task of re-investigating the brutal murder had so far found nothing to support the widely-held suspicion that ABRI personnel played a role in the killing.
"We will investigate any ABRI members who the team believes were involved in the affair," Imam said, as quoted by the Antara news agency.
Activists from the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute in Jakarta, who conducted their own investigation last year, say they have evidence that some ABRI members were involved in the murder.
Marsinah, who has been declared a labor heroine by both activists and the All-Indonesia Workers' Union (SPSI), was murdered after she led a strike at a watch factory in Sidoarjo, East Java, on May 4, 1993.
Her horribly mutilated body was found four days later in a hut in Nganjuk, about 200 kilometers west of Sidoarjo.
The police reopened investigations into the murder after the Supreme Court freed, this month, seven civilians sentenced to between four and 12 years for her torture and murder.
The East Java high court in Surabaya, East Java, last November overturned a lower court decision against Santoso, who had been sentenced to 17 years in jail for masterminding Marsinah's murder.
Imam said he believed that those released were involved in the murder.
He said he was aware of the belief, strongly held by the public, that ABRI personnel were involved and that the suspicion had been strengthened when a military court jailed Capt. Kusaeri for 10 months in 1994.
Kusaeri was found guilty of failing to report to his superior on a meeting at which the murder was planned.
"Kusaeri is the only ABRI officer who was involved. And remember that his involvement was not direct. He only failed to report on the meeting," he said.
If it later proved to be true that ABRI was involved in the killing, there must have been collusion between individual officers and company managers, he said.
Imam, who is also chief of the local branch of the national security agency, echoed ABRI Chief Gen. Feisal Tanjung's pledge to punish any Armed Forces member involved in the killing.
He said that so far the security agency had not taken part in the re-investigation but that it would cooperate fully whenever it was needed.
Commenting on theories that Marsinah was murdered at the Sidoarjo military district headquarters, Imam said: "I have investigated it and found it to be untrue."
"Witnesses said they did see her there but they insisted they met her somewhere else before she went missing at one in the morning," he said.
President Soeharto has called for a thorough re-investigation of the Marsinah murder.
Meanwhile, officials of the National Commission on Human Rights, which also conducted its own investigation, said this week they were ready to give the police their findings whenever needed.
Commission member Muladi said in the Central Java capital of Semarang earlier this week that police were focusing their investigation on a housemaid of Yudi Susanto, who was the manager of the watch company where Marsinah worked.
The maid, Susianawati, was considered a key witness, has testified that she saw Marsinah in Yudi's house before she was found dead.
Susianawati was reported "missing" from her house just a few days after the Supreme Court released the seven people convicted by the lower court.
"Finding the maid will remove the public's suspicion that there has been an attempt to hide something in the Marsinah affair," Muladi told The Jakarta Post. (pan/har)