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)