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Disgraced Indonesia’s ex-police general sentenced to death for murder

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2023

The South Jakarta District Court sentenced on Monday former National Police internal affairs chief Ferdy Sambo to death for the premeditated murder of his own aide-de-camp Brig. Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat and for tampering with evidence in orchestrating a cover-up.

The panel of three judges found Ferdy guilty of the two counts. The sentence is much harsher than the life in prison demanded by prosecutors for Ferdy as the principal perpetrator.

The initial narrative surrounding the incident suggested that Yosua was killed at Ferdy’s official residence in South Jakarta in July 2022 in a shoot-out with Richard Eliezer, another aide-de-camp assigned to Ferdy. Richard at the time was an enlisted officer who ranked lower than Yosua.

Judges said on Monday, however, that Ferdy had instead fired a shot into Yosua’s head after Richard had shot Yosua at Ferdy’s command.

“The defendant, who was wearing a glove at the time, walked toward [Yosua who was lying on the floor after being shot by Richard] and shot the victim using a Glock firearm,” presiding Judge Wahyu Imam Santoso said.

Ferdy had said that he ordered Richard to deal with Yosua after his wife Putri Chandrawathi claimed she had been sexually assaulted by Yosua in Magelang, Central Java, the day prior to Yosua’s murder. But Ferdy said he did not plan the murder beforehand.

Judges concluded on Monday that Ferdy’s claim was not backed by convincing evidence. They also questioned why he did not take Putri for a forensic examination for sexual abuse victims to prove the alleged assault despite his experience as a police officer.

“The bench did not find sufficient evidence that Yosua had committed sexual assault or rape,” Wahyu said.

The judges concluded that Ferdy had enlisted the help of accomplices Kuat Ma’ruf, a private chauffeur and domestic assistant with Ferdy’s family, and another aide-de-camp Ricky Rizal, to provide back-up for Ferdy in case Yosua put up resistance in their eventual confrontation.

The judges also said Ferdy had instructed several police officers to destroy any CCTV footage that showed Yosua still alive when Ferdy entered the house, in an attempt to maintain the initial narrative that Yosua was already killed in a shoot-out with Richard when Ferdy arrived.

Judges pointed to the convoluted statements Ferdy had made, his senior role in the police, his involving other officers in his crime and his disgracing the police institution as aggravating factors. The three-member bench found no mitigating circumstances for a lighter sentence.

Trials of accomplices

Judges are scheduled later on Monday to hand down their verdict on Putri, who is facing eight years in prison as demanded by prosecutors; while Kuat and Ricky will have their verdicts delivered on Wednesday.

Richard, meanwhile, is facing a possible 12 years in prison for his alleged role in the murder, with the court set to read out its verdict on Wednesday. Prosecutors in his case had said their sentence demand would have been greater if Richard had not eventually told investigators about the murder plot and agreed to cooperate with the authorities.

Ferdy’s case is regarded as the biggest scandal to embroil the police to date and has seized public attention for months. Subsequent public opinion polls following Yosua’s death found plummeting public trust in the police, leading to mounting calls for widespread reforms of the institution.

Ferdy, a two-star police general, was dishonourably discharged in August.

The Jakarta Post

Asia News Network

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Balloon may be “brazen” China testing US defences, analyst says, as US stumped by latest flying objects

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2023

The United States said on Monday it still does not know the origin or purpose of three aerial objects that its military shot down over the weekend, following the downing of a suspected Chinese spy balloon on Feb. 4.

US military fighter jets on Sunday downed an octagonal object over Lake Huron, the Pentagon said. On Friday, an object was shot down over sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska, and a third, cylindrical in shape, was destroyed over Canada‘s Yukon on Saturday.

An analyst who spoke to Reuters speculated that the balloon may have been a “brazen” attempt by China to test US military defences.

And a scholar of aviation who spoke to Reuters, while not drawing conclusions about China’s motives, put the balloon incident in the context of a rich history of militaries testing each other’s capabilities, as the U.S. and Soviet Union did in Cold War.

Since the Chinese spy balloon drifted into US territory and was shot down, US fighter jets have downed three more mysterious objects over North American airspace starting on Friday.

Kari Bingen, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Reuters that the sheer size of the balloon, at around 200 feet tall, and its trip across the United States, was a particularly “brazen” act by China.

China said it had no information about any of the three objects. Washington called the first object, the Chinese craft, a surveillance balloon while China has insisted it was a weather-monitoring vessel blown badly off course.

Bingen, the director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS and a former US undersecretary of Defense, speculated that China may be testing the waters with the balloon foray.

“Are they testing our response? Are they testing our military operational response? Are they testing our political response?” she asked.

“In a crisis or conflict would they use balloons, would they launch a barrage of balloons and forced us to figure out, do we target those and expend precious munitions on those or do we focus on the fight in the Indo-Pacific?”

The three objects downed this week, flying at altitudes of between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, were considered a risk to air traffic, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said at a news briefing on Monday, although they did not pose a threat to people on the ground. They also were shot down because US authorities could not rule out that they were spying, he said.

Aviation scholar Michael Hankins of the National Air and Space Museum told Reuters that the kind of tit-for-tat accusations and high-stakes aerial drama of the last few weeks were parred for the course during the Cold war.

“There are some really fascinating stories about this kind of aerial reconnaissance aspect in the Cold War when you’re talking about the Soviet Union, you know, looking at the US and vice versa,” said Hankins, who is Curator of US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps post-World War II Aviation.

The US would send up fake signals to see if Soviet radar would lock onto them or fly drones intentionally into enemy territory, “so they could see, you know, how well do we have to fly, how detectable does our aircraft have to be for the Soviet defences to be able to see us?”

Those tactics were important to gathering information that led to the development of new aircraft like stealth aircraft, he said.

“I’m not going to speculate about what China’s doing, but the history of trying to figure out what the other side’s capabilities are, that’s something militaries have always done throughout time,” Hankins said.

The Chinese balloon triggered an uproar in Washington, shaking up the already contentious relationship between the world’s two biggest economies and prompting US President Joe Biden‘s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, to cancel his scheduled trip to Beijing last week.

China on Monday widened its dispute with the United States over aerial surveillance, claiming that US high-altitude balloons had flown over its airspace without permission more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022. The White House denied the assertion.

Reuters

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World’s first that’s saving Australia’s wildlife one treehole at a time

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2023

As Australia’s wildlife grapples with the loss of habitat created by logging and bushfires, conservation biologist Matt Stephens looks into a tree hollow he carved using the Hollowhog, a game-changing tool he invented to create artificial tree hollows that become new homes for animals

According to Stephens, a natural hollow would take a minimum of 70 to 120 years to start forming. The Wilderness Society estimates that in Australia, 303 native wildlife species rely on hollows to nest and shelter, including 31% of native mammals and 15% of native birds. The Hollowhog can closely replicate nature, but faster.

“The fact that we can rapidly install one of these hollows within less than an hour is, you know, a real game-changer. And to think that then that hollow that we have created may last potentially two or three hundred years into the future, and each year producing another generation of fauna,” Stephens told Reuters on Monday. “It’s a really exciting thing.”

At his property in Blue Mountain’s Sun Valley, Stephens watches as a new hollow is installed by arborist Eamon Dempsey, who now works solely on installing hollows with the Hollowhog tool, rather than cutting down trees or tree branches.

The Hollowhog is a high-speed cutting head with tungsten carbide tips that spins at a rate of around 11,000 rpm to carve into the wood of the tree, creating an entrance hole.

“Through that entrance hole, I can carve down that way, up that way, sideways, so I could get, in this instance, a 90-centimetre tall hollow by 45 by 90 centimetres wide to wide. So, a massive internal cavity for a tiny little entrance,” said Stephens.

While nest boxes were seen as a solution, they remain a static structure. Whereas those created by the Hollowhog are able to grow in size along with the tree as it grows and wraps its tissue around the carved hollow, all the while remaining stable.

The New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service has already started using the Hollowhog to create much-needed habitats for Australia’s wildlife, as well as the Department of Primary Industry, landcare groups and arborists like Dempsey.

“The very first time I ever got my hands on a Hollowhog and actually started carving, it really filled me with hope that my career doesn’t have to be all about cutting trees down, and that there is actually potential there for me to do more environmental, have a more positive environmental impact than a negative one by cutting trees down for my entire career,” said Dempsey having installed over 1,000 hollows himself.

conservation biologist Matt Stephens

After installing a camera opposite one of the Hollowhog hollows, Stephens has seen various animals use it, including parrots like Rainbow Lorikeets, Rosellas, marsupials like Antechinus or gliders, and even a Lace Monitor lizard taking a peek inside.

Stephens hopes the Hollowhog will help Australia’s hollow-dependant wildlife exist past the current rate of extinction.

“I can see the hollow going in, and know that long after I’m gone, maybe 300 years into the future that the hollow that we carved, for example, the hollow that we carved today, will still be operating, it will still be there, potentially as a home for wildlife. Just thinking about that I just think it’s a really exciting thing,” said Stephens.

To date, thousands of hollows carved by Hollowhog tools have been installed around Australia.

Reuters

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US shoots down another flying object, fourth strike in a week

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2023

The US Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to US intelligence experts.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”

“At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat, unknown, that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it,” said VanHerck, head of US North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Northern Command.

VanHerck’s comments came during a Pentagon briefing on Sunday after a US F-16 fighter jet shot down an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border, acting on orders from US President Joe Biden.

It was the third unidentified flying object to be knocked out of the sky by US warplanes since Friday, following the Feb. 4 downing of a suspected Chinese weather balloon that put North American air defences on high alert.

Another US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said separately after the news briefing that the military had seen no evidence suggesting that any of the objects in question were of extraterrestrial origin.

VanHerck told reporters that the military was unable to immediately determine the means by which any of the three latest objects were kept aloft, the means of their propulsion, or where they were coming from.

The incidents come as the Pentagon has undertaken a new push in recent years to investigate military sightings of UFOs – rebranded in official government parlance as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs.

However, the government’s effort to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects — whether they are in space, the skies or even underwater — has led to hundreds of reports that are being investigated, senior military leaders have said.

But so far, the Pentagon has not found evidence to indicate Earthly visits from intelligent alien life, those officials have said.

Reuters

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Cambodia’s Hun Sen orders shutdown of independent local news outlet

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered the shutdown of one of the last independent local news organizations in the country on Sunday night, saying it had attacked him and his son and hurt the country.

The Voice of Democracy, also known as VOD, will no longer have a license to publish or broadcast from 10am local time on Monday, the prime minister said in a statement posted on his official Facebook page. He ordered Phnom Penh police to “keep order” but not seize property. He said foreign donors to VOD should take back their money and its staff should find new jobs.

“Commentators tried to attack me and my son Hun Manet,” Hun Sen wrote. He said a VOD story published earlier this week had hurt the “dignity and reputation” of the Cambodian government, and he ordered the Ministry of Information to cancel VOD’s license.

VOD on Wednesday (February 8) published a story on Cambodia’s earthquake aid to Turkey. The story quoted government spokesperson Phay Siphan saying the prime minister’s son and presumed successor Hun Manet had signed the aid agreement. Hun Manet is the joint chief of staff and deputy commander for the country’s armed forces, and signing such an agreement appeared to have overstepped the bounds of his position.

Human rights activist, Phil Robertson, said it was just a matter of time’ before VOD was shut down where he deemed this a ‘clean sweep’ on independent critics to pave way for Hun Manet to take the lead of the government in the future.

VOD is not the first media organization to be shut down in Cambodia. The Cambodia Daily was shut down in late 2017 after being given one month to pay millions in back taxes that the publication disputed. The paper had a reputation for breaking news on tough issues and was shut down months ahead of the last general election in 2018. The next general election is due to be held in July.

Reuters

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Anwar’s daughter quits as economic adviser over nepotism accusations

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s eldest daughter, Nurul Izzah Anwar, has stepped down as his economic adviser just over a month after her controversial appointment, but will co-chair a secretariat advising the Finance Minister instead.

Anwar, who also holds the finance minister post, was accused of nepotism after he appointed Nurul Izzah, 42, who lost her parliamentary seat in the November general election, as his pro bono adviser on economics and finance on Jan 3.

On Feb 7, Anwar announced the setting up of a special advisory panel which reports directly to the Finance Minister and advises on matters related to subsidies, including reviewing and restructuring existing subsidies.

It also advises the Finance Minister on matters related to government-linked companies, including determining their relevance and consolidating them where appropriate, as well as national debt and good governance.

The panel includes national oil firm Petronas’ former chief executive Hassan Marican, Sunway University economics studies director Yeah Kim Leng and Universiti Malaya distinguished professor of economics Rajah Rasiah.

The decision to form a secretariat for the panel was made at the panel’s first meeting last Friday.

“Advisory committee chairman, Hassan Marican, has invited me to join the advisory committee’s secretariat to help in their efforts to strengthen the country’s and the people’s economy,” said Nurul Izzah in a statement.

“I humbly accept this responsibility. With this new role, I will no longer serve as a senior adviser on economics and finance to the Prime Minister.”

Earlier on Sunday, Hassan announced that Nurul Izzah had been invited to co-chair the secretariat together with Petronas senior manager Khairil Anuar Ramli in order to support the committee’s operations.

Despite Anwar insisting that his daughter’s previous short-lived role was an unpaid one, critics said the move reeked of nepotism as Nurul Izzah did not have experience in economics and finance.

He had defended her appointment, saying: “Nepotism is where (a family member) is given a position to abuse power, enrich themselves, obtain contracts and get paid a huge sum. This is not the case.”

Nurul Izzah has a degree in engineering and a second degree in public and social policy from Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

She is the vice president of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), which is led by her father.

In the last general election, she lost her Permatang Pauh parliamentary seat – a traditional PKR stronghold – to Perikatan Nasional by nearly 6,000 votes, after having won it in 2018 with nearly 16,000 votes.

Some netizens commented online that Ms Nurul Izzah’s two posts did not seem that different.

Facebook user Fadhirul Anuar wrote on TV station Astro Awani’s page: “This is the same thing. He wants his daughter to have a role in his government.”

The Straits Times

Asia News Network