Police press case against alleged drug trafficker
Police press case against alleged drug trafficker
JAKARTA (JP): The city police have handed over to the
prosecutor's office the dossier of a foreigner charged with
trafficking 800 grams of heroin, despite the suspect's claim that
the police have arrested the wrong man.
"We handed over the dossiers along with the suspect and the
material evidence about two weeks ago to the Jakarta Prosecutor's
Office," Jakarta police spokesman Lt. Col. Iman Haryatna told The
Jakarta Post yesterday.
The suspect, an African who is believed to have two different
personal identity cards, was arrested at the Plaza Hotel in the
Mangga Dua area in West Jakarta on Feb. 20.
According to the police and eyewitnesses, including a friend
of a suspect who was detained earlier, the man holds a Malian
passport and has been identified as 24-year-old Ibrahim Saebu. He
escaped from detention at Jakarta police headquarters on Oct. 1
last year several days after being arrested.
Upon being arrested for a second time last month, the suspect
said the police had caught the wrong person, claiming that he was
Razak Musah, 27, a businessman holding a Ghanian passport number
A 328386.
When he was arrested in September, he was holding a Malian
passport and also an International Student Identity Card number R
9525313 bearing his picture under the name of Ellias Prince Ben,
28, an American national studying in Texas.
All of the ID pictures are similar.
The documents found in his hotel room during the second arrest
reveal that the suspect, after escaping, went abroad using his
Ghanian passport and visited several cities in Thailand and
Malaysia before returning to Jakarta via Belawan in North Sumatra
from Penang, Malaysia, on the Ekspress Bahagia cruise ship on
Feb. 16.
The suspect obtained a visa from the Indonesian consulate
general's office in Penang a day earlier.
During the pre-dawn raid at the Plaza Hotel, the suspect tried
to escape through the ceiling in his hotel room when detectives
from the Jakarta Narcotics Division broke in, police said.
"We failed to get his fingerprints during our interrogation
after the second arrest because he somehow managed to erase his
own fingerprints," said officer Iman.
However, Iman said, "we're not going to drop the case just for
lack of fingerprints."
The suspect will soon go on trial along with his African
friend, Mustafa Abdul Ganewu, who holds a Ghanian passport.
The two were apprehended at different hotels in Central
Jakarta on Sept. 23. They were caught in possession of 800 grams
of heroin, worth Rp 400 million (US$175,000).
The two suspects are being kept in separate cells at the
city's police headquarters. (bsr)