Serial killer may be behind youths' deaths

JAKARTA (JP): Four young men, whose dead bodies have been found in bushes around the defunct Kemayoran airport in Central Jakarta in the past two years, are thought to have been murdered by one person.

"Judging from the wounds on the four bodies and the place where the corpses were found, we strongly believe that the crimes were committed by a single party," City Police Spokesman Lt. Col. Iman Haryatna said yesterday.

According to medical experts, one of the victims, identified as 12-year-old Andri Renaldi had also been sodomized.

However, the officer said that a special police team set up to investigate the case has not yet come to a conclusion whether the teenagers were victims of a homosexual.

"It's not that easy for us to come to a conclusion about the motive. The suspect is being hunted while three of the four victims are still unidentified," Iman said.

Due to the decayed state of the corpses, the lack of material evidence, or the identities of the victims, "the police are finding it difficult to solve the case," the spokesman said.

All four victims were aged 12 or 13. Their bodies were badly decomposed with their palms, fingers and part of their skin and scalp peeled.

The first two were found respectively on March 28 and Sept. 13 last year and the other two this year on April 9 and last Wednesday.

It was only the first victim that has been identified, Iman said.

"So far nobody has come to us to claim the other victims," Iman said.

A reliable police source in Central Jakarta said that a man in his 20s had earlier been suspected of killing Rinaldi,

However the suspect disappeared when detectives arrived at his boarding house a few days after Rinaldi's body was found.

"His whereabouts is still unknown," the source said.

When asked for confirmation, Iman refused to explain, saying that the Kemayoran police with the support of senior detectives from the Central Jakarta police have started work collecting as much information as they can to track the killer.

At least three other bodies with similar wounds have also been found in the past two years in East Jakarta. (bsr)