New Evidence in an Old Case: The Unresolved Murder of Udin

A WOMAN shrieked hysterically inside the courtroom of the Bantul District Court in Yogyakarta. Her screams could be heard outside. "He didn't do it!" she shouted. Visitors who filled the courtroom that Monday, September 2, 1997, were shocked into silence. The woman had not only given her testimony, she embellished it with examples of what she saw was a terrible miscarriage of justice.

The woman in court was Marsiyem and the man she referred to was Dwi Sumaji alias Iwik, a driver whom the police had charged as the murderer of her husband, Fuad Muhammad Syafruddin, better known as Udin. He had been beaten senseless in front of his home in Bantul, on the night of Tuesday, August 13, 1996. He was in a coma for four days before he died.

November 11, 2014