Jakarta – The latest biographer of former Indonesian dictator Suharto said Tuesday he believed the ex-president had no part in plotting the 1965 coup that indirectly paved his way to power.

Australian academic Robert E. Elson also said he believed Suharto was not personally corrupt despite the billions allegedly amassed by his family during his 32-year rule, The then lieutenant-general Suharto headed the army's elite strategic reserve Kostrad when coup plotters kidnapped and killed six rightist army generals in 1965 – an event shrouded in mystery ever since.

Suharto crushed the coup and officially took over from founding president Sukarno in 1967. He and his government blamed the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) for the botched coup which many have speculated he had a hand in masterminding.

Elson, author of "Suharto, A Political Biography," told a lunch with foreign journalists that "the argument that Suharto was involved as an active conspirator is almost certainly wrong." "I have found no evidence ... which indicates Suharto was in any direct way involved in the coup." Elson, who has studied Indonesia for more than 20 years, said the plot was the work of a group of junior officers against some senior rightist members of the army.

"This was a classic case of a bungled attempt to change the face of politics," he said.

But what began as a leftist attempt to rearrange the balance of political forces started going badly wrong as soon as the generals were murdered. Suharto, as the most senior officer in command after the generals were kidnapped, suppressed the coup after just a few hours.

Blaming the PKI, then Asian's second largest communist party after China, he secured full power from Sukarno to reestablish order in March 1996 and immediately banned communism.

He then led a bloody campaign, purportedly against communists and their allies, that left some half a million dead across the archipelago.

Elson also said he believed Suharto had not amassed a single penny under his own name. The US Time Magazine alleged after Suharto stepped down in May 1998 that he and his family were sitting on a fortune of some 15 billion dollars.

"I would be very surprised that Suharto would have one single cent in his name," Elson said, adding he was not interested in money but in power.

However, he said Suharto would see "no problem with someone who advances the good of society as a whole to receive a kickback." Elson said Suharto's "greatest crime" was that his rule was so personalised that it "effectively meant Indonesia could not move anywhere unless someone was pulling the strings."

Suharto, 80, has been in and out of hospital for a minor stroke and other ailments. He spends his time under treatment at his home in the Menteng upscale residential area of Jakarta.

He was charged in 2000 with embezzling 571 million dollars in state funds but has never stood trial due to his reported illness.