Agencies in Jakarta – A human rights worker has given a chilling account of narrowly escaping a group execution in Aceh province in which four people were shot dead.
Nazaruddin, a volunteer worker with the Rehabilitation Action for Torture Victims in Aceh (Rata), watched in horror as three of his colleagues were gunned down and five others tortured by what he believes was a military death squad. When his turn came to be executed, Mr Nazaruddin untied the ropes binding his hands and fled into a forest as a volley of shots rang out behind him.
"I was too scared to look back to see what happened to the others. I ran for my life," the 22-year-old said. Bloodied and bruised, he hid for two days before being smuggled out of the territory to Jakarta by foreign human rights workers.
The United Nations and other international organisations have condemned the killings. It is the first time a witness has given a first-hand account of arbitrary executions in Aceh, a largely Muslim province on the western tip of Indonesia's archipelago where at least 6,000 people have been killed in a guerilla war between separatist fighters from the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and Indonesian troops since the 1970s.
Mr Nazaruddin said he had been in a car in north Aceh with fellow Rata workers Ernita, 23, and two male co-workers, Idris, 27, and Bachtiar, 24, last week. They were pulled over by a convoy of men in civilian clothes who he suspected were soldiers, along with known government informants "led by a man called Ampon Thayeb".
"Thayeb ordered us to get out of the car. He ... took our wallets ... our watches, and Ernita was ordered to take off her necklace and bracelets," he said.
The informants accused them of divulging information about human rights abuses. "We explained that we were not political but humanitarian workers. Thayeb said we were lying, because the area was known as a GAM base and no one would be brave enough to go there, implying that we had to be GAM."
Mr Thayeb accused them of "stirring up the people" and only helping victims of military violence. Half an hour later, they were ordered out of the cars and beaten bloody with rifle butts. The beatings were filmed by one of the armed men. The convoy then drove through several military command posts. "Thayeb asked [a commander at one post] where he should get rid of us, saying 'Should we finish them off here?' The commander told him, 'No, not here'."
Arriving at a recently bombed village, the soldiers terrorised residents, seizing a local man, named as Rusli, who was trying to flee. The convoy then stopped in a forest, where Thayeb told the four aid workers they had 15 minutes to confess, Mr Nazaruddin said.
Near a ruined house, Ernita and Idris were shot in the head, the aid worker said. Then he ran. "I later heard two shots, and believe that Bachtiar and Rusli were killed then," he said.
Aceh's Human Rights Care Forum said on Saturday that 841 people had been killed in Aceh this year, more than twice the previous year's toll, with civilians making up more than two-thirds of the dead. A spokesman for Indonesia's security forces in Aceh denied policemen or soldiers were involved in last week's massacre.