Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – Sobbing witnesses, lawyers walking out in protest against the judges' decision, and a defendant who never looked up from a book he was reading throughout the trial – even courtroom scenes in television soaps are rarely this exciting.
One dramatic scene after another marked yesterday's trial of militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who is facing treason charges.
The setting was already special: Three detained suspects were testifying from Singapore via video-conference.
Five 60cm television monitors and one smaller set were placed in the courtroom for the judges, the prosecutors, the defendant and the audience. The equipment and technicians for the teleconference were brought in from Singapore.
It is the third time the Indonesian court system has used video- conferencing in a trial, after former president B.J. Habibie testified from Germany in a graft case and a human rights case last year. The prosecutors also plan to hear testimonies of three other detainees in Malaysia next week.
But Bashir's team of lawyers did not like it. They argued that since there was no ruling on video-conferencing in the country's legal system, the trial was flawed.
Senior lawyer Mohamad Asegaf told the court: "As a consequence of our stance and viewpoint, with all due respect for the integrity of the court, we resign from the trial and will leave the courtroom specifically when teleconferencing is used to hear the testimonies of witnesses in Singapore and Malaysia." They then walked out of the courtroom together, cheered by hundreds of Bashir loyalists.
A subsequent request by Bashir to leave the courtroom was denied by the judges.
Calling the trial unfair, Bashir said: "I would stay in the courtroom but I would not be present here in the trial." And he stuck to his word by reading an Islamic book, ignoring the trial that lasted about six hours.
When the first witness, Faiz Abu Bakar Bafana, was moved to tears at the sight of a man he said "is like my own father" on the TV screen, Bashir ignored him.
When the second witness, Hashim Abas, was asked by the prosecutor to identify the cleric he knew only by the alias Abu Somad, Bashir refused to lift his head up to accommodate the camera trying to get a close-up on him.
And when Hashim asked to hear from the man himself denying his leadership of the Jamaah Islamiah (JI), Bashir defied the judge's order to address the request. But that was hardly any consolation for the hundreds of the cleric's loyalists at the trial site, which was set up at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency building in Central Jakarta.
They had come expecting the witnesses to deny Bashir's involvement in the JI, as in the previous cases when several Bali bombing suspects were flown in to give their testimonies. So they were visibly upset when the first witness confirmed that Bashir was the group's supreme leader.
Minutes after Faiz testified, the cleric's supporters left the room en masse. Many more, gathered outside the courtroom, also left the complex, shouting "Allahu Akbar" or "God is great".
Asked to comment on the witnesses' testimonies, Bashir said: "I don't feel that I'm present in this room."