TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama’s legal team has questioned the police investigation report (BAP) of an Indonesian language expert Mahyuni in yesterday’s blasphemy trial.
According to Ahok’s defense attorneys, Mayhuni’s answers in the BAP were exactly the same as another witness’. “Why were [his answeres] exactly the same as another expert witness’? Please answer,” Basuki’s defense lawyer Humphrey Djemat said at yesterday’s trial.
He said that 14 questions posed by investigators were answered in the same way as a witness named M. Husni Muadz, Mahyuni’s colleague, who asked him to become an expert witness in Ahok’s trial. Humphrey questioned whether Mahyuni had been told by his colleague to give the answers.
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Mahyuni denied the accusation. The witness claimed that he was not aware that his answers were exactly the same as Husni’s. “I don’t know,” he said. “I did not copy [another witness’ answers],” Mahyuni said. He said that he only received advice from Husni on the directions to find the Bareskrim office. “Because I was not familiar with Jakarta.”
Earlier in his testimony, Mayhuni argued that Governor Basuki considered the al-Maida, verse 51 of the Quran a tool to deceive others. According to him, the word “being lied to" had a negative meaning. “When the word was chosen, the person in question believed that al-Maida was a tool to deceive,” he said.
Mayhuni sees Ahok’s statement as a sequence that has a contextual meaning. Ahok had intentionally referred to the Quranic verse since he had a concept of what was intended to be conveyed as a governor. However, he said that the statement was not relevant to the then topic of fisheries on the Seribu Islands.
Yesterday’s trial also heard the testimony of an expert in the field of religion from the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) Muhammad Amin Suma. Public prosecutors asked Amin to explain religion in relation to blasphemy.
AVIT HIDAYAT