Reenactment of Munir mystery

JAKARTA: The government-sanctioned fact-finding team and the police are set to stage a reenactment of what happened on board the Garuda Indonesia flight from Jakarta to Singapore that carried well-known rights activist Munir to his death.

"We hope to conduct the reconstruction in the third week of February but it also depends on when Garuda Indonesia will be able to provide us with the aircraft and the crew members involved in the case," said Usman Hamid, a member of the fact- finding team, on Friday.

Munir, the founder of both Imparsial and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), died of apparent arsenic poisoning aboard a Garuda flight on Sept. 7, 2004, on his way to Amsterdam.

Usman also said that his team would study the video tapes from the surveillance cameras in the boarding area of Soekarno Hatta International Airport from the time when Munir boarded his flight.

"By viewing the tapes, we hope to find out who Munir met in the boarding area," Usman said.

He added that so far the fact-finding team had questioned six people, and intended to question three of these further. -- JP