A man who orchestrated the killings of two US teachers at a US-owned gold mine in Papua Province was sentenced to life in prison yesterday, moments after he and the other defendants walked out of the courtroom alleging their trial was a sham.
Prosecutors claim the seven men -- all indigenous Papuans -- were members of a small rebel army fighting for a separate state in the resource-rich province.
They are accused of shooting Rickey Lynn Spier, 44, of Littleton, Colorado, and Leon Edwin Burgon, 71, of Sun River, Oregon, in 2002 as their car headed down a road toward the mine, owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold Mine Inc.
Judge Andriani Nurdin said the ringleader, Antonius Wamang, deserved life behind bars instead of the 20 years demanded by prosecutors because he planned the ambush.
"This was premeditated murder," she said.
Verdicts for the other six men were expected later in the day.
The defendants have remained silent throughout the course of their five-month trial and regularly walked out in protest. They did so again yesterday, escorted in handcuffs to the Central Jakarta District Court's detainment room ahead of the ruling.
"We haven't been able to meet with our clients in jail for the last month," said Johnson Panjaitan, one of their lawyers. "Can you imagine that a client cannot communicate with his lawyer?"
The attack originally complicated ties between Washington and Jakarta amid suspicions that Indonesian security forces guarding the mine were involved. But an FBI investigation found no evidence linking soldiers or police to the killings.
Wamang -- indicted by a US grand jury in 2004 for the murders -- has acknowledged being a Papuan separatist and said he shot at the convoy because he thought it was carrying soldiers.
But the other men, accused of providing logistics for the attack, maintain they were innocent civilians.
"We had nothing to do with these shootings," said Ishak Onawame, 54, before the verdicts were read out. "Our trial has been manipulated for the interests of two countries, Indonesia and the United States."
Dozens of Papuan student protesters gathered outside, chanting: "Release them! Release them!"
Washington said earlier that Indonesian cooperation with the FBI probe into the killings was a condition for restoring military contacts with Jakarta.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS