The police are having to answer more and more questions regarding the suspicious circumstances surrounding a police officer's death in Jakarta, including the absolute lack of security camera footage from the scene.
As previously reported, the National Police said Brigadier J was gunned down by his colleague, Private Second Class E, at the South Jakarta home of their boss, Internal Affairs Division Chief Inspector General Ferdy Sambo, on Friday, July 8. The official line from the police is that J had molested Ferdy's wife and threatened to kill her, before firing at E first after he was caught.
With the incident rippling shockwaves throughout the country, discrepancies in the National Police's account of the incident have come under scrutiny. One notable point of suspicion was how the police claimed that CCTV cameras at Ferdy's home were switched off at the time of the shooting, after the network malfunctioned two weeks prior.
Yet it seems there was a greater attempt to cover up the truth by eradicating video footage from that day.
Seno Sukarto, a retired police general who now serves as the RT (neighborhood unit) chief, dropped another CCTV bomb when he spoke to reporters yesterday, saying that plain-clothed officers replaced the CCTV decoder at the neighborhood's security guards outpost on July 9.
"I only found out the following Monday. [The officers] weren't wearing uniforms," the former chief of the Aceh Provincial Police and the Medan City Police said, adding that he was notified about the decoder by the neighborhood's security guards.
Seno explained that security cameras placed on the streets fed footage to the decoder. One of those cameras points to the street in front of Ferdy's house.
"[The officers] haven't even seen me to this day, and I am truthfully upset. What do they take me as? I'm sorry, but I'm a general," he said.
Aside from CCTV cameras, the police were also under scrutiny for revealing the case to the public on Monday – three days after the shooting. The police on Wednesday chalked that up to delays in the investigation brought about by the Eid Al Adha holiday on Saturday and Sunday.
In the first police press conference about the case, there was notably no mention of the sexual assault angle, with E and J supposedly firing at each other over a personal dispute. J molesting Ferdy's wife before the shootout was first mentioned in a follow up press conference.
Furthermore, when J's body arrived at his family home in Jambi, his family claims they weren't allowed to see into the casket by police. When they eventually did, they say they saw what looked like stab wounds in addition to bullet holes. The family also claims that J's phone had conveniently gone unaccounted for.