Jakarta – Police in Cianjur, West Java, yesterday began the grisly task of examining 20 corpses that were recently found hanging from trees at Mount Sawo Valley, a report said.
Antara quoted local residents as saying the victims are believed to be practitioners of black magic. Police arrested several of the alleged killers yesterday.
Yes, we have heard about the case and arrested scores of killers and the mastermind behind the crimes, 47-year-old Apih B.R.M., and all of them are now being held at Cianjur Police headquarters, Cianjur Police Detective Chief, Senior Inspector Agus Nugroho, was quoted as saying by Antara.
The Media Indonesia daily yesterday reported that a group of lost trekkers had discovered the decomposing bodies hanging from trees in the valley.
One of trekkers, Heru (18), told Media Indonesia they had found the rotting corpses on Tuesday but did not inform police of the gruesome discovery until Thursday.
Heru said he and his friends had become lost in the valley beneath Mount Sawo in Cianjur district, some 150 kilometers southeast of Jakarta, during a trekking competition.
The trekkers were horrified when they saw the rotting corpses. We ran away when we spotted the decomposing bodies hanging from the trees, Heru told police yesterday.
He was accompanied by a lawyer, Yudi Junadi, during his police interrogation. Junadi said rumor has it that 90 shamans in the district have been kidnapped and murdered by an evil vigilante gang over recent months.
An extremely bad smell always came from the valley at the mountain, but we never dared to go there to find out what had happened, a local resident who wished to remain anonymous told Antara. Residents of Cianjur have found several bodies in other locations and claim the victims are all sorcerers killed by the vigilantes. In 1998 a wave of killings of alleged sorcerers took place in East Java and Central Java, leaving more than 100 dead.
The killings were believed to be politically motivated, as many of the victims were followers of the Nahdlatul Ulama Muslim organization, which in those days was led by cleric Abdurrahman Wahid, who went on to become president, despite opposition from hardline military supporters of ex-president Soeharto.