The death of a local politician belonging to the Islamic-based United Development Party (PPP) and the salacious circumstances under which police say his body was found has led to significant controversy in Indonesia as well as the detainment of a transgender woman (referred to locally as waria) who investigators believe was the last person to see Muhammad Syafii Has alive.
The 58-year-old, who is believed to have died on Thursday night, had been the deputy chairman of the branch development committee of PPP in the Jombang regency of East Java. Police say that his body was found nearly naked and with blood coming out of his ears in a sugarcane field on the edge of the Brantas River in Mojokerto, East Java.
Mojokerto Police Chief Puji Hendro Wibowo said officers had detained a waria, identified by her initial V, for questioning in regards to Syafii’s death.
“[V] is the last person who was seen with the victim and the only one who knows what happened to the victim that night,” Puji said on Sunday as quoted by Kompas.
Puji said that, based on interviews with witnesses, Syafii had been seen with V on Thursday night near the place where his body was eventually found. He had also been seen talking to V in a nearby cafe earlier in the night.
Police have not yet officially determined the cause of Syafii’s death and Puji did not specify if V was being considered as a possible criminal suspect.
But police did indicate that signs were pointing against this being a murder case. Although the official autopsy report has not yet to been issued, police said there were no signs of violence on Syafii’s body and that the blood from his ears was likely caused by burst blood vessels, possibly due to a fatal heart attack.
Based on evidence from the scene of his death and testimony from numerous witnesses, police did a recreation of Syafii final hours and their finding strongly suggested that the PPP politician had gone to the area to purchase the services of a waria sex worker and died in the middle of the act. Police believe V was with him at the time of his death and fled due to fear. Syafii was found with his wallet intact and mobile phone and motorcycle near his body.
However, Syafii’s wife denied that her husband could possibly have done anything so immoral as he had always been a religious man and good father who rarely went out at night. He had told her he was going to visit a friend in a nearby town the day before she got the news of his death, which she said could not have happened naturally.
Officials from PPP, a highly conservative party that has strongly supported the government’s persecution of LGBT individuals and demanded that homosexual acts be criminalized in the currently under-discussion revision to the country’s criminal code, have also said they did not believe that Syafii could possibly have engaged in such an immoral act before he died and asked the police to treat his death as a murder so that the culprit could be found.
Doug Schnitzerling says
Who is investigating the members of the faith who are the so called moral police. Are they above God. It’s a never ending story. Always fraught with misinformation leading to people being harmed.