Novel Baswedan's Lawyer Questions Police's Criminal Charges
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2 January 2020 14:04 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The advocacy team of Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) investigator Novel Baswedan criticized the criminal charges used by police against the two men responsible for the acid attack against the KPK investigator.
They argue there is a tendency to localizing the terror act into a single suspect scenario driven by a personal vendetta.
“The team of advocates sees a tendency towards building the narrative that there’s only a single suspect and that it is oversimplified as if to make the case a matter of personal vendetta,” said a member of the advocates, M. Isnur on Thursday, January 2.
Police have charged the two active police members, Rahmat Kadir Mahulette and Ronny Bugis, with Article 170 of the Criminal Code (KUHP), which oversees abuse causing severe injuries.
Isnur argues that police investigators should use Article 55 KUHP that would enable them to implicate intellectual actors behind the acid attack despite not naming any suspects yet.
The man representing Novel Baswedan’s advocacy team says the latter Article was used in the murder case against human rights activist Munir Said Thalib, which enabled the fact-finding team to link the murder to state officials and not only the field executor, Pollycarpus.
M ROSSENO AJI