Jakarta – Three Indonesian student activists who picketted the national assembly last month, have related how they and a fellow protestor were abducted at gunpoint and held incommunicado for 13 days, reports said Saturday.

The four, all members of the Land Reform Consortium (KPA), had been staging a hunger strike to protest the appropriation of farmers' land by big companies when they were removed from the assembly premises by police on August 14, the Indonesian Observer said.

But three of them told a press conference arranged by rights groups in Jakarta that after they were dropped off in the city by police, they were picked up in a street by masked gunmen, and taken to separate unknown destinations.

One of the four, Usep Setiawan, 27, said he was asked to explain the group's activities and name people who had given money to the KPA. "I wasn't tortured ... they just covered my head during the interrogations ... sometimes they shook my head if my explanations didn't satisfy them," Usep said.

The three, who often broke down and cried during the press conference, said they were unable to identify their abductors, who had warned them that their families would be killed if they made their experiences public, the Observer said.

"They repeatedly asked me about looting from timber companies, forest concession areas, commercial plantations and other areas," Usep said. "From the tone of the questions I thought they were accusing me and my fellow KPA activists of masterminding such looting activities across Indonesia."

The three said they were moved several times, and had no idea where they were until being freed individually and handed air tickets for Jakarta by their captors. All found themselves hundreds of miles from Jakarta, two in the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, and another in Semarang.

The founder of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KONTRAS), Munir, told the press conference that the style of the abduction showed the men were "not civilians."

"Civilians would not know how to leap out of a car, point guns at people and force them into a vehicle, all within a matter of seconds. It was a professional job," Munir said.

The abductions were the first known since 23 student pro-democracy activists were kidnapped during the dying months of the rule of former president Suharto who quit in May of 1998 amid mass student protests.

Of the 23, nine were found alive, one found dead and 13 are still missing. Indonesian special forces troops were found guilty last year of abducting the nine, but the mastermind behind the act was never named.

Since Suharto's fall thousands of farmers and landless people have tried to reclaim land they said was taken from them with little or no compensation by plantation and timber companies.