Fidelis E. Satriastanti – The Indonesian Forum for the Environment has handed over to the antigraft commission further evidence that it claims points to corruption in the handling of the Sidoarjo mudflow disaster.

In December, the environmental group, known as Walhi, submitted its preliminary findings to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) indicating possible graft in the dropping of a probe into PT Lapindo Brantas, which is widely believed to have caused the disaster, and in the appropriation of relief funds from the state budget.

In March 2006, mud began spewing from a fissure near a gas drilling well operated by Lapindo, a company under the umbrella of the Bakrie group, controlled by the family of then Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie. The ensuing mudflow inundated hundreds of hectares of land, leaving thousands of people homeless.

"We want to ask the KPK about its follow-up progress on our first report and also to present three new pieces of evidence that indicate something amiss in the police's decision to drop the case," Walhi's mining campaign manager Pius Ginting said on Thursday.

The East Java Police halted its probe into the case in August, citing a lack of witnesses to confirm any link between the mudflow and drilling activities at Lapindo's Banjar Pandji I well.

Pius said what was irregular about the investigation was the amount of time police and prosecutors spent bouncing the case dossier back and forth between them, the absence of a police site survey as mandated by the Attorney General's Office and the citing of previous cases in Lapindo's favor as precedents for dropping the probe.

In 2008, the South Jakarta District Court rejected Walhi's claims that Lapindo was guilty of causing environmental damage in Sidoarjo.

"The reasons given for dropping the case were too weak," Pius said. "Their first reason was that the dossier had gone back and forth four times between police and prosecutors. There's no limit to how many times a dossier can go back and forth. It's just standard procedure. They should have been more serious because the incident caused the country Rp 5 trillion in losses and caused 300,000 families to lose their homes."

He added that the police's citing of previous cases filed and lost by environmental groups against Lapindo as precedents was "too weird."

"At the time, we had filed a civil suit, which only requires formal proof," he said. "But the case handled by the police was based on criminal charges, which requires material proof obtainable only from institutions with higher security clearance, such as the KPK and the police. As an NGO, we don't have the access or the equipment to delve deeper, but they can."

Pius said the slew of irregularities indicated a case broker at work. "We are convinced there was a case broker and corruption involved in the issuance of the government order to drop the case against Lapindo," he said.

KPK spokesman Johan Budi said the commission was not authorized to probe the police's decision to drop a given case.

"We don't deal with law enforcement procedures," he said. "It's not within the KPK's jurisdiction to check whether the decision to drop the case was valid. But if they can show proof that one party gave money to another, then we can step in."

[Additional reporting by Antara.]