Ulma Haryanto – A forensic expert faced the Judicial Commission on Monday to clarify testimony he gave during former antigraft chief Antasari Azhar's murder trial last year.
Mun'im Idris, who performed the autopsy on the victim, was the first trial witness questioned by the commission after it announced that it was re-examining the case amid claims that the judges who convicted Antasari had ignored key evidence.
Muni'm, the forensic chief at Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta, faced the judicial body's top officials, including deputy chairman Imam Anshori Saleh, in a closed-door meeting.
The doctor told reporters after the session that he had been asked to clarify his testimony about the autopsy performed on businessman Nasrudin Zulkarnaen.
During the trial at the South Jakarta District Court, which lasted from October 2009 to February last year, Mun'im testified that the body had been "manipulated" by the time he saw it.
"I corrected my testimony," he said on Monday. "When I said 'manipulated,' what I meant was that the victim's body had been compromised [as evidence]."
He said the gunshot wounds had been stitched closed, the victim's hair had been shaved and his clothes had been removed.
"The fact that the body had been tampered with made efforts to determine the exact details of his death less than desirable. For example, I could not determine the angle of the bullet when it entered the body," Mun'im said.
Imam said commissioners asked the doctor to explain the autopsy process in detail, from the time the body was brought to the morgue to the time Muni'm finished the examination. Imam said Muni'm "thoroughly explained" unclear points in his testimony and autopsy report.
The Judicial Commission is scheduled to meet with a ballistics expert on Thursday and an IT expert next week, and Imam said the entire process could take more than the usual two months for this type of investigation.
"We might summon more experts and witnesses," he said. "This is a big and a complex case. There are a lot of cross-examinations that we have to do."
But Imam stressed that the commission, which monitors the conduct of judges, was not trying to retry the Antasari case. He said the results of the investigation would only be used to determine whether the judges grossly neglected evidence in convicting Antasari, a former chairman of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).
Imam said the judicial body would also look into the possibility that the judges had been subjected to outside threats, which could have affected their ruling.
"But Antasari may use [our results] as a point of consideration if he wants to request a review [of the case] by the Supreme Court," Imam said.
The Supreme Court upheld Antasari's murder conviction in September. His lawyers filed a petition with the Judicial Commission in February this year.
Antasari was sentenced to 18 years in jail for the March 14, 2009, gangland-style murder of Nasrudin. Prosecutors said he ordered the killing after the victim threatened to reveal Antasari's affair with Nasrudin's third wife, Rani Juliani, a golf caddie.
The scandal saw Antasari suspended from the KPK. During his three years leading the antigraft body, he oversaw cases against a former central bank governor, an in-law of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and a senior official at the Attorney General's Office.