Tangerang Police busy hunting down 2 women escapees

Tangerang Police busy hunting down 2 women escapees

JAKARTA (JP): While still unable to pick up the trail of the
country's most wanted criminal, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra,
police officers are busy hunting down two women convicts who
escaped on Friday from Tangerang Women's Penitentiary on the
western outskirts of here.

Local police detectives have been distributing pictures of
fugitives Angel Deby, 35, and Maya, 40, and are tracing their
whereabouts by keeping the homes of their relatives and places in
which the two used to live under close surveillance.

"Angel used to live in Kwitang, Central Jakarta, while Maya's
parents live in West Java.

"We hope they turn up at these places. We haven't bothered
confronting their families. We'll just keep a close watch," the
Tangerang Police chief of detectives, Sr. Insp. Agustinus B.
Pangaribuan, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Like many senior police officers in their efforts to arrest
Tommy, the youngest son of former president Soeharto, Agustinus
firmly believes his men will apprehend the two women soon.

"We'll get hold of them, don't worry. It's only a matter of
time," he said.

When Tommy was declared missing a day after his request for
pardon was rejected by President Abdurrahman Wahid early in
September, senior police detectives claimed that they knew the
precise hiding place of the fugitive and his arrest was imminent.

The officers, however, were proven wrong as Tommy is still at
large.

According to officer Agustinus, one of the women prisoners,
Angel, would have been released from prison in March.

"What Angel did was really stupid. There was a big chance of
her being released from jail by March next year," he said.

Angel was serving an 18-month jail term for heroin possession
while Maya was serving eight years for trafficking in ecstasy
pills.

Claimed to be the first escape in the history of Tangerang
Women's Penitentiary, the two together with another convict --
all jailed in a single cell -- shocked the town on Friday with
their daring escape attempt in the early hours of the day.

The other convict, Ranni Andriani, 25, a cocaine smuggler who
was sentenced to death in August by the local court, failed to
reach the other side of the four-meter wall. She fell from the
wall, broke her hip and was found two hours later crying on the
ground of the prison compound.

Officer Agustinus quoted Ranni, who is still being treated at
Tangerang General Hospital, as saying that the three had planned
the escape a few days earlier.

They had taken turns to cut the steel bars of their cell with
a steel saw, which they had managed to smuggle into jail, since
Wednesday.

"On Friday evening, they managed to bend the bars, slipped
through them and ran straight for a prison guard tower located at
a far end of the penitentiary.

From there, they climbed the wall," Agustinus said.

As part of their plan, he said, the convicts had gathered
enough nylon cloth from their handicraft classes in the prison.

"They made this into a rope, and used it to scale the
penitentiary wall. Ranni, however, fell," he said.

Shortly after being found by prison guards, a single Ranni
said she wanted to leave simply because she desperately missed
her family during Ramadhan fasting month, a holy month for
Muslims.

Agustinus explained that he had assigned some of his men to
also closely monitor the surroundings of the home of Ranni's
parents in Cianjur, West Java, and her cousin's house in East
Jakarta.

The three women's attempted escape, he added, would be filed
soon in separate reports with the Supreme Court for which the
three could face new criminal charges.

"The (appeal on the) drug cases of the three convicts are
still pending at the Supreme Court and this new development will
be considered by the court.

The jail terms Angel and Maya were serving could be
increased ... that's why I say they're stupid," Agustinus said.

While no penitentiary official could be reached for comment on
Sunday, a staffer, who requested anonymity, laughingly told the
Post that the prison guards always considered women convicts
"docile things".

"They consider these women docile. These women don't usually
cause much trouble and are at times very helpful. I don't know
about those three women though," the male staffer said.

"Yes, we are considering increasing security at the jail, but
I have no idea when." (ylt)