A Dutch autopsy has found that arsenic poisoning killed a high-profile Indonesian human rights campaigner on a flight to Amsterdam two months ago.

The victim's group, Tapol, claimed the man was murdered. It joined the Dutch Foreign Office in calling for a high-level criminal inquiry into his death.

Indonesian police this evening confirmed they had received an autopsy report from The Netherlands saying the body of leading Indonesian rights campaigner Munir (one word) contained excessive levels of arsenic.

Chief detective Suyitno Landung said a police team would be dispatched to The Hague following the study by Dutch forensic teams on the corpse of Munir, a pioneering rights activist during the era of former dictator Suharto.

"The results that we received shows that the body of the late Munir contains arsenic or metals which exceed normal levels, although we cannot determine when he consumed them," Agence France-Presse reported Landung as saying.

"We also cannot determine in what form the arsenic was consumed whether it was carried in water or other things." Munir, 38, was a leading critic of Indonesia's military and had been credited with leading the push for democratic reforms before and after the fall of Suharto in 1998. He collapsed and died on a flight to Amsterdam on September 7. His death was initially blamed on a heart attack. But an autopsy completed by the Dutch Forensic Institute found he died from a dose of arsenic, the NRC Handelsblad newspaper reported on Thursday.

It said the Dutch Foreign Office was calling for a criminal investigation into Munir's death.

Munir's human rights group Tapol said on Friday it had always feared that he had been assassinated. "During the many years we have campaigned for human rights, this is the first time, to our knowledge, that an Indonesian human rights activist has been murdered in this way though many others have suffered horrific fates in the course of their work," it said. "That this should have occurred several years after the collapse of the Suharto regime makes the tragedy even more chilling." TAPOL said senior military officers may have seen Munir as a dangerous foe and called on the Indonesian government to order a thorough investigation. Details of the report have not been publicly released.

Dutch diplomats had handed the report to Indonesian foreign affairs officials, who had conveyed the report findings to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general who was elected this year on a promise to deliver reforms.

Indonesia's chief foreign affairs spokesman Marty Natalegawa said the report was received on Thursday and was handed over to Indonesian police to follow up. "We cannot disclose yet whether it was a poisoning case, because we have not yet given it to his family," he told AAP.

Munir helped expose human rights abuses by Indonesia's powerful military from East Timor to Aceh. He also led an independent investigation into the shooting of student activists by security forces in 1998, when students forced then president Suharto out of power and demanded new parliamentary elections. He was instrumental in highlighting the disappearance of dozens of activists, many of whom were recovered thanks to his efforts.

Last year a small bomb was detonated outside his house after he criticised a draft Truth and Reconciliation Bill as toothless.

His widow Suciwati Munir demanded access to the autopsy report. "As his wife, I should be the first person to receive my husband's autopsy results, not the government," she told journalists.

Munir had been on his way to Amsterdam to take a course in humanitarian law in Utrecht when he began vomiting shortly after the Garuda Indonesia flight left Singapore's Changi Airport . He died several hours later.

The poisoning allegation coincides with calls from the New York-based Human Rights Watch for Yudhoyono to do more to safeguard human rights in the world most populous Muslim nation.