Police in the city of Malang, East Java on Friday arrested a seminar speaker, who is identified by his initials AS, who has been accused of assaulting 10 vocational school students — an incident that was captured in a video that has gone viral in Indonesia.
According to reports, on Thursday, the Muhammadiyah 2 Vocational School invited AS to speak to 125 students about digital marketing. After several students allegedly disrupted his presentation by laughing, AS made them come to the front and line up to be slapped hard, as seen in this video picked up for a news report by MetroTV:
In the video, AS can be seen slapping 10 students and calling them each “goblok,” a demeaning term to insult one’s intelligence, before ordering them to sit back down.
The parents of nine of the 10 students reported AS to the police that same day. Police arrested AS on Friday in the city of Surabaya, and are now looking into the possibility that he may have fled Malang to evade arrest.
The students received minor injuries from the slapping.
“Only one medical exam result has been released, showing one student with a bloody lip. The others appear to have bruises,” Malang City Police Chief Dony Alexander said, as quoted by Kompas.
Following his arrest, AS said in a police press conference that he lost his cool when he slapped the students.
“The incident was the result of me losing control because, all my life, this is the first time I used my hands this way. I have never done this before,” AS said.
Police charged AS with violation of the Child Protection Law, which could see him jailed for up to three years and six months if convicted.
Though reports suggest that there was at least one teacher present during AS’ presentation, the school’s principal has apologized for allowing the incident to occur in his school and has called for the harshest punishment possible for AS.
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