Sundarti not guilty, says family

ID Nugroho, The Jakarta Post, Magetan

Sujinah, 60, kept quiet in her wheelchair when The Jakarta Post visited her house in Mangge, Magetan, in East Java. Her eyes were empty.

"I don't know what to say," she said, breaking the silence.

The frail woman's grand-daughter, Sundarti, 24, has been found guilty in Singapore for killing both her female employer and the employer's daughter earlier this year.

Despite Sundarti consistently denying the offense, the Singapore Supreme Court found her guilty on Friday and sentenced her to life in jail.

However, Sundarti's family in Magetan still don't believe that Sundarti, a graduate of junior high school, killed her two employers. "If she committed the murders, she must have had a very good reason for it," said Suparto, 67, Sundarti's grandfather, who said he knew Sundarti well.

Sundarti's family in Megetan is poor. Minus her father, who died in 2001, The family lives together in an 8 by 10 meter house made from wood and bamboo.

The house is inhabited by Suparto, Sujinah, Sundarti's mother, Binarti, and her younger sister, Selvi Prihatin.

Sundarti was the second person in the family after her father, that they could count on for extra income.

The family's poverty pushed Sundarti to find a good job to help meet the family's needs. In 1999, she decided to work in Singapore.

Her work in the island state for the next two years helped finance her sister's schooling until senior high school. After the death of her father in 2001, she returned to Singapore in 2002.

Nothing happened until last year, when the family heard a newspaper report that Sundarti was being prosecuted for killing her employers. Sundarti's mother, Binarti, went to Singapore to check whether the report was credible. Her trip was financed by the Indonesian Embassy in Singapore.

The report was later confirmed but Binarti failed to meet Sundarti in Singapore, although she did not say why.

Binarti returned to Indonesia and the family waited with apprehension for a year, knowing Sundarti was charged with murder, with a maximum death sentence. Earlier, the prosecutor called for the court to sentence her to death.

The family was relieved after Sundarti was "merely" sentenced to life.

Commenting on the trial, Sri Wahyuningsih, an activist with the Women's Crisis Center, said Sundari's case was a blatant example of how the government had failed to fight for the interests of Indonesian workers overseas. "The government did not put pressure on the court to shed light on the cause of murder, or whether the murder was actually committed by Sundarti," she said on Thursday. The government was also negligent in other cases, she said.