Questions of credibility over Newmont floor Police
Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Police complained on Wednesday that state prosecutors in Manado, North Sumatra had given them so many questions in the returned case file of the six suspects in the Buyat Bay pollution case that it meant they may have to start the probe again from scratch.
National police director of specific crimes division Brig. Gen. Suharto said prosecutors returned the case files with 39 questions.
Six PT Newmont Minahasa Raya executives were named suspects in the alleged mercury contamination of Buyat Bay in Minahasa, North Sulawesi. They are Americans Richard B. Ness and Bill Long; Australian Phil Turner; and Indonesians David Sompie, Jerry Kojansow and Putra Jayatri.
"Only now they (prosecutors) question the credibility of our laboratory. We have used several test results from the laboratory in court proceedings before and prosecutors never doubted them," said Suharto.
Other questions related to such things as the verification by experts on the methods used in collecting samples that led them to the conclusion that Newmont was responsible for the alleged contamination.
Police conducted research on the bay in August and tested the samples in a police laboratory in Jakarta.
They subsequently announced that the bay had been polluted by Newmont, saying that the tests indicated that the heavy metal content in the bay had far exceeded the legal limit.
Many have questioned the police's competence in processing samples taken from the bay as they have never provided details about their laboratory methods.
Pressure has also been put on the police to explain why the results of their laboratory test were so utterly dissimilar to the many other tests conducted there by reputable international scientists.
The police investigators have insisted that their laboratory was capable of testing all sorts of samples because they had "up- to-date equipment acquired from abroad."
They also claimed that they followed scientific procedures in collecting samples.
However, they have not been willing to publicly explain how they actually carried out the sampling.
Suharto added that aside from a request for accreditation, the prosecutors also asked police to gather control samples from areas near Buyat Bay to be used as a comparison to samples taken previously from the bay.
"We will send a team on Thursday to gather more samples as required by the prosecutors. Meanwhile, we will also try to fulfill other requests," he said.
A police investigator complained that the requests had forced police officers to start the investigation all over again.
"We've never had these kinds of requests before. It seems they (prosecutors) deliberately put us in a difficult situation," said the investigator.