Police should get full autonomy in Marsinah case
JAKARTA (JP): As police are expressing confidence that some answers may be in sight in the reopened investigation into the murder of labor activist Marsinah, a legal expert has called for the enquiry to be carried out with greater professionalism and that it be granted complete independence.
Satjipto Rahardjo, a lecturer at Diponegoro University in Semarang, Central Java, said there was a danger that the fresh investigation into Marsinah's murder would flounder unless police were granted "full autonomy" and managed to pursue the culprits in a "really professional" manner.
Satjipto, who is also a staff lecturer at the Semarang Police Academy, said it was the absence of those two factors that had created "complications" in the previous investigation, with less than optimal results.
The police needed to learn from the mistakes made in the previous investigation, Satjipto said on Monday, as quoted by Antara. "In order to get good results, the new investigation should refer back to the first," he said.
"All parties should be willing to gracefully admit it, if any members of theirs are eventually found to be involved in the case," he said.
Satjipto did not explain what he meant by the terms "members" and "parties".
Both the East Java police and the national police have announced separately during the past week that they have new suspects in the case and that the solution to the mystery of who killed Marsinah is in sight.
The authorities acknowledged that the "new suspects" were not necessarily different from the nine people convicted after the first investigation and later exonerated by the Supreme Court on the ground of insufficient evidence. The Supreme Court's decision prompted the police to launch a fresh investigation into the murder.
East Java Police Chief Maj. Gen. Roesmanhadi told reporters last week that his force had identified a number of people suspected of being involved in the 1993 murder of Marsinah.
It was also Roesmanhadi who disclosed earlier this month that the police had discovered blood traces, identified as belonging to Marsinah, in the house of Yudi Susanto. The latter was among the nine initial suspects.
The announcement came as legal experts argued that, by law, Yudi could not be tried for an offense of which he had already once been acquitted.
The owner of PT Catur Putra Surya, the watchmaking company in Sidoarjo where Marsinah worked, was found guilty by the lower court of masterminding the murder.
In Jakarta, director of the crime investigation section at national police headquarters, Brig. Gen. Rusdihardjo, said on Monday that the number of the new suspects may be two or three.
He did not name the suspects, however. "We wish to adhere to the principle of the presumption of innocence," he said. "We're still studying the case...we can't yet name them as suspects yet," he added.
Since the investigation was reopened last month, police have questioned four Sidoarjo military officers who were involved in the industrial dispute going on between Yudi and his employees at the time of the murder.
So far the investigation has failed to find any evidence connecting the officers with the murder. (swe)