Pollycarpus suspiciously friendly: Wife
Tiarma Siboro, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A Garuda pilot, currently on trial over the murder of leading human rights campaigner Munir, had approached him a year before he was poisoned to death in 2004, his widow testified on Tuesday.
Suciwati said the defendant, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, acted "weird and too friendly" for someone he did not know well.
Munir died in the business-class cabin of a Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam on Sept. 7 last year. A Dutch autopsy found a lethal dose of arsenic in his body.
Suciwati said she recognized Pollycarpus because he made several phone calls to her home to ask about her husband's flight schedule.
"It was on Sept. 2 last year that he (Pollycarpus) called my husband's handphone. I picked up the phone and he introduced himself as a Garuda employee. He asked about my husband's flight schedule and I told him that my husband would travel to the Netherlands on Sept. 6," Suciwati told the trial of Pollycarpus at the Central Jakarta District Court.
"He said that he would be traveling on the same flight as my husband. I told my husband about the phone calls and he just gave a simple comment that Pollycarpus was a weird person and acted too friendly," she added.
Presiding judge Cicut Sutiarso asked Suciwati to elaborate on her statement. She replied that Munir met Pollycarpus for the first time before her husband flew Switzerland in 2003.
At that time, Pollycarpus introduced himself and asked Munir to help mail a letter from a nearby post office as soon as his flight touched down at the Swiss airport, Suciwati said.
"My husband wondered why Pollycarpus had to ask him to do that ... As a pilot, he could have just asked his friends' help to mail the letter. My husband was also worried if the letter would cause him problems."
Prosecutors charged Pollycarpus with violating Article 340 of the Criminal Code on premeditated murder, which carries the death penalty.
They also accused Pollycarpus of forging documents to provide him with a special "aviation security" assignment to travel on the same flight with Munir on the first leg from Jakarta to Singapore, during which he allegedly persuaded Munir to move from the business class to executive class.
Besides Pollycarpus, police have also named two other Garuda employees as suspects -- Oedi Irianto and Yeti Susmiati.
Suciwati said she was convinced that Pollycarpus executed the murder of Munir, but urged police to capture the masterminds, who she described as "untouchables" linked to the National Intelligence Agency (BIN).
"There was a relation between Pollycarpus and BIN. It's a fact that cannot be denied," she said.
Former BIN chief A.M. Hendropriyono has denied any wrongdoing in the murder, but refused to appear before a fact-finding team formed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The team ascertained that the poisoning death of Munir was somehow connected with certain top officers in the spy agency.
Munir gained prominence during Soeharto's rule, when he staunchly criticized human rights abuses by the military.
After Soeharto's fall in 1998, he went on to probe killings by troops during the bloody struggle for independence of Indonesia's former province of East Timor, and military-led violence in the separatist-troubled provinces of Papua and Aceh.
"Beginning in the late 1990s when my husband began to fight for people's rights, my family has received seven threats, including bomb terror threats addressed to our house (in Semarang, Central Java) and to my husband's office (in Jakarta). But law enforcers never brought a single case to court," said Suciwati, a mother of two.
"These incidents should tell the court that my husband was targeted by heartless parties."
During Tuesday's trial, the court also heard testimony from members of Garuda's board of directors, including its former president Indra Setiawan.