The police have arrested a woman suspected of buying something while in the buff at a pharmacy in West Jakarta, an incident that was caught on video which inevitably went viral in Indonesia.
“Yes, we arrested her earlier, after our officers found out her identity,” said Andi Adnan, head of West Jakarta’s Crime Investigation Unit, as quoted by Okezone Monday evening.
The woman, identified as 26-year-old VM, was arrested in her apartment in Setiabudi, South Jakarta last night. She is currently being questioned at the Tamansari police station.
The police have not revealed VM’s motives for daring to shop almost naked in Jakarta and during the holy month of Ramadan of all months. The only detail about the case that the police have revealed so far is that she bought cajuput oil – an Indonesian staple topical medication – during her daring run into the pharmacy.
Previously, VM was filmed wearing nothing but a thong while shopping at a pharmacy in the Tamansari district of West Jakarta on Friday evening. On Monday, another video emerged of a woman walking down another street in Jakarta wearing nothing but a bra and police believe it is the same woman as she was sporting what appears to be the same tattoo on her back.
Before her arrest, police yesterday said that the naked woman in the videos may be charged with violating Indonesia’s strict anti-pornography law, While the vaguely worded bill should technically punish those who filmed her and contributed to spreading the video to the public, it has been used to jail those who were simply the subject of pornographic material in the past.
One notable example of this was the imprisonment of singer Nazril “Ariel” Irham for his sex tapes – which he said were created for personal use (not illegal in Indonesia) – in 2010, despite prosecutors not presenting any evidence that he intended for the tapes to be released publicly.
If VM does get charged for pornography, then it could set a precedent for those charged with public indecency in the future.
For whatever reason, it appear the Jakarta Police have gone to much greater effort to capture VM than others who have appeared naked in public in the past. One recent example is the naked white guy who walked down Jakarta’s busy Rasuna Said street twice in 2015. No arrests were made and we still don’t know who he is or why he did it.
