Amir Tejo, Surabaya – Police should revoke their recent order for cessation of investigations into who was responsible for the Lapindo mudflow disaster, the East Java chapter of the Forum for the Environment said on Monday.

Monday's action followed a police announcement on Friday that police had issued a letter known as an SP3 that formally closed the investigation and absolved 13 executives and other staff of energy company PT Lapindo Brantas of all blame for the mudflow disaster that began in 2006, leaving 15,000 people homeless.

The forum, known as Walhi, said it was prepared to work with geological experts to produce new evidence if the investigations were resumed.

East Java Walhi chapter executive director Catur B. Nusantara told a press conference "we're ready to give new evidence in collaboration with the Engineering Drilling Club."

He said Walhi believed police had influenced public opinion over the investigation by claiming there were no witnesses who could confirm a correlation between the mudflow and drilling activities at the company's Banjar Pandji I well.

The police had cited the lack of witnesses as one of the reasons why the case could not go to court. "If the police had done a thorough investigation, the witnesses could have presented data on the drilling incident so conclusions could have been drawn," Catur said.

Catur said it was not necessary that witnesses had to have actually seen the drilling that resulted in the mudflow. He cited as an example the 2004 assassination of rights activist Munir Said Thalib, saying the case had been taken to trial despite a lack of a witness who could to testify that they saw the actual murder.

"In the Munir case, the [alleged] murderer was found through a logical and objective analysis of cause and effect," Catur said. "The same method should have been employed in the Lapindo case."

Catur said Walhi believed that in addition to misleading the public, the police had also watered down Lapindo's responsibility in the matter.

By concluding that Lapindo was not to blame for the mud disaster, the company could not be sued for material and other damages. "In the end, it's the state and the people who have to pay for the loss," Catur said.

Walhi also criticized Friday's police statement that the order to cease the probe into the Lapindo case had been issued with regard to the Jakarta High Court and Supreme Court rulings in the class-action suit against Lapindo.

The class action lawsuit – a civil case – and a criminal lawsuit are two different things, it said.

In three years of legal battles over Lapindo, the police have submitted the case dossier four times to East Java prosecutors.

Each time, the prosecutors office returned the files to the police, citing insufficient evidence to go to court and demanding that the police complete the files concerning evidence the police claimed they had difficulty producing.