Jakarta – The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) has agreed in a plenary meeting to start a thorough inquiry into alleged human rights violations by former president Soeharto during his 32 years of iron-fisted leadership.

M.M. Billah, who is leading a Komnas HAM team investigating Soeharto, said on Thursday that government rights watchdog had decided to establish several teams for the inquiry.

"At present, we are only able to interview victims and witnesses. We are now trying to get confirmation from the authorities who were in charge then," he said without mentioning any of them by name.

Last month, the commission said it had found preliminary evidence of human rights violations perpetrated by officials and leaders of the New Order regime over a period of 32 years.

The investigations will focus on five major cases recognized as the most egregious of the rights violations that occurred during that time.

The five chosen consist of the detention without trial of suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) on Buru island following the 1965 coup d'etat that brought Soeharto to power but was officially blamed on the PKI, the extrajudicial murders of suspected criminals known as the Petrus operation in the early 1980s, the Tanjung Priok massacre in early 1984, the military crackdown in Aceh from 1989 through 1998 and the July 27 attack on the Indonesia Democratic Party (PDI) headquarters in 1996.