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)