On Aug 20, Nur Mahmudi Ismail, who was mayor of the satellite city of Depok from 2010-2016, was named a corruption suspect by the police for allegedly embezzling money from a road construction project in the city.
The Depok Police have questioned Nur in the case but have not taken him into custody. They probably won’t be able to anytime soon because, according to someone close to him, he’s recovering from amnesia.
Tafi, a former staffer for the ex-mayor, said that Nur had a concussion while playing volleyball on Aug 18 and that he’s currently recovering at home after he was recently discharged from the hospital.
“He was playing volleyball with local residents and suddenly he fell and hit the back of his head,” Tafi told reporters yesterday, as quoted by Liputan 6.
“Maybe at the time he forgot memories of the past. But nowadays he’s getting better.”
Well, hopefully Nur won’t forget details pertaining to his graft case.
Nur has been on the police’s radar since April for suspected embezzlement involving a 2015 road construction project in Depok, which they say cost the state around IDR10 billion (US$681K) in losses.
Although we cannot say whether or not Nur is one of them, politicians conveniently falling ill or getting injured to escape criminal investigation is not that rare in Indonesia. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is former House Speaker Setya Novanto’s fake car crash and subsequent hospital treatment, for which his lawyer was sentenced to seven years in prison for engineering what appears to have been a poorly-planned cover-up conspiracy.
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