"A Hero of Aceh"
Fadly Fajar was coming home from work in the city of Medan, Indonesia, when a notification popped up on his mobile phone. It was 10 October 2020, and the notification said that he had received a direct message on Facebook Messenger from a friend.
Fadly…is this your boy?
Attached to the message was a link to a social media post. A 9 year old boy was suspected of having been murdered in Aceh Province, when a man broke into his home, attacked him with a machete and raped his mother. There were pictures of the child, whose body had yet to be found, but who was believed not to have survived the attack on 9 October 2020.
The pictures were of Fajar’s son, Rangga.
“I was in deep shock. But I thought it might be a social media hoax, so I hurried home and told my parents. My ex-wife’s phone was off. We called her parents but they also didn’t know. We were more and more confused, so we contacted the police.”
“They said the news was true.”
Fajar lives in a small house in the corner of a scrap yard that cannibalises tourist buses, stripping some for their spare parts and fitting them into newer buses that have broken down.
He poses for pictures in front of the carcass of one, standing next to a mountain of used spare tires. His mother, Rangga’s grandmother, makes a living operating a small concession stand out of the family kitchen in the corner of the yard, selling tea, coffee and snacks to the workers. In front of the family home there are two faded bus seats which double as patio furniture. Rangga’s little brother, Rizky (5), plays on the floor of the living room which is also the bedroom. He has just come home from Islamic prayer class and is in a bright mood.
He looks a lot like his older brother.
Just three weeks prior to his death, Fajar’s ex-wife had come to the family home and taken Rangga with her back to Aceh. She had moved there after her divorce from Fajar and remarried. While Fajar and his wife had been divorced for two years, they had yet to file for official custody of their boys, who originally both lived with their father. But Fajar’s ex-wife wanted Rangga to go to school in Aceh.
“I didn’t want him to go at first, but he was always closer to his mother, and he was happy about it. It was her right as a parent too. So I told her over the phone that she could take him, but that we would discuss it in person first. I wanted to know her address. But then she came to Medan and took him when I was at work. I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.”
Without an address, Fajar had no idea where Rangga lived.
“We left at 6 am from Medan and started driving around Langsa. We went to the local clinic where we thought he may have been taken, but he wasn’t there. So we went to the police station,” Fajar explains. “They said that my ex-wife had been taken to the main hospital in the city. When we found her, she was hysterical. I tried to support her. There was no need for us to fight. I told her to focus on her health,” he adds.
“My ex-wife still had hope. ‘Find him,’ she said. ‘He’s still alive’. But I knew he was dead. She said he had been hacked 10 times with a machete.”
Rangga’s body was found around 3.30 pm on 11 October in a river in a place called Birem Bayeun. According to Fajar, he had a 5 cm deep cut on his neck and his left cheek has been cleaved in half.
The attack started at around 2 am, when a man named Samsul Bahri prised open the door of Rangga’s new home in the middle of an oil palm plantation. Rangga and his mother were asleep in bed together, when Bahri started to touch her and pull at her clothes. Her husband had gone out for the night, and originally she thought he had returned early. Her cries woke Rangga, who began screaming at the attacker. Rangga and Bahri fought, with Bahri slicing at the child.
“My ex-wife told me that after five blows of the machete, my boy was still standing. She intercepted the third blow with her arm and shouted at him to run, but he wouldn’t,” says Fajar.
“Rangga’s arms were up defending himself, and the machete slit his wrists and he bled to death. I keep thinking about how much pain he must have been in. I can’t stop thinking about it. He was only 9 years old. A little boy defending his mother’s honour. Maybe even I, a grown man, wouldn’t have done that. I’m so proud of him.”
Bahri then stuffed Rangga into an empty rice sack.
“My ex-wife said that he was still moving,” says Fajar. “His last words were, ‘Ma, it hurts.’ But my wife told me he didn’t cry.”
When Bahri left the home, to toss Rangga into the nearby river, his mother ran through the thick oil palm plantations to find help—an ordeal which took over two hours. It was around 6.30 am when someone coming home from the mosque found her at the side of the road. She was bleeding, and had been raped four times on the floor of the family home by Bahri, while Rangga lay dying inside the rice sack.
“He was a sadist with no soul. He was not human,” says Fajar.
Bahri was a recidivist. He had originally been sent to prison for drug offenses but, while inside, had killed a prison guard and had been handed a 20 year sentence. Having served 15 years for the murder, he had been granted early release in May 2020.
He had been free for five months when he killed again.
Bahri was released under a programme conceived in April 2020 which was meant to curb COVID-19 clusters in Indonesia’s prisons.
The brainchild of Indonesia’s Minister for Law and Human Rights, Yasonna Laoly, the COVID-19 assimilation programme uses two pieces of ministerial legislation: Human Rights Ministerial Regulation No. 10/2020 and Human Rights Ministerial Decree No. 19/2020, both of which were drafted during the pandemic to allow for the “release of prisoners and juvenile inmates through assimilation and integration to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, Indonesia’s prison system housed more than 270,000 inmates in March 2020—over double its capacity. Overcrowding in prisons across the country is the product of overzealous use of custodial sentences for petty crimes, and byproducts of this overcrowding include unsanitary conditions and frequent riots which are often deadly. In conjunction with the release programme, Laoly asked that the Indonesian Supreme Court curb the number of new inmates sent to Indonesian prisons, which stood at 2,500 per day pre-pandemic.
Yet while the programme’s original intentions were perhaps worthy, some parts of it do not stand up to scrutiny.
“Releasing people, particularly with seemingly little understanding about recidivism risks, isn’t going to help quell the spread of COVID-19 all that much,” Terrorism and Security Analyst, Judith Jacob, tells Hukum.
“They would have to release in huge numbers, which they would be unwilling and unable to do, if they wanted to properly socially distance and clean [the prisons]. It is also unlikely that that Indonesian police have the resources to effectively monitor everyone they let out.”
As a result of the programme, some 37,000 inmates have been released, out of a projected 50,000, including draft convicts, drug offenders, foreign inmates and “special crimes” convicts with chronic illnesses.
Bahri somehow also qualified for the scheme, which, at the time of its inception, Laoly said he hoped would not cause a “moral hazard”.
In May, Ahmad Ramadhan, the National Police spokesperson, said some 135 prisoners released under the new scheme had been rearrested across 23 provinces for crimes such as theft and robbery, including 17 criminals in North Sumatra.
“The prisoners’ crimes also included murder, rape, gambling, child sex abuse, assault and drug abuse […] Some cases were also linked to grudges, especially for assaults and murders," he said.
Bahri, who murdered Rangga in October, is not included in the above figures, and updated numbers of recidivist crimes are not publicly available.
Upon his arrest, Bahri took a vow of silence—as if trying to exercise as much of the dwindling power he still had left. He refused to tell the authorities where he had disposed of Rangga’s body, even after he was pictured being marched out of a palm oil plantation by police, naked from the waist up, and wearing a pair of black jeans with the buttons undone.
In another picture, he is seated in the back of a police van, wearing an orange police-issue rompi or jumpsuit with three bandaged wounds, two on each of his lower legs and one on his left thigh. According to the police, they had to shoot Bahri three times when he tried to “evade capture”.
In all of the photographs, Bahri cuts a forlorn figure—an attitude that he continued to adopt while in prison.
According to the police, the recidivist went on a “hunger strike” while in his holding cell, refusing food and drinks and appearing “depressed”. Several theories were floated about why this may be the case, including that the bullet wounds on his legs were making him ill, and that he was upset at the prospect of having to go back to prison after five short months of freedom.
When he refused to speak to anyone or even lift his head to acknowledge the police officers guarding him, he was taken to hospital and put on a drip, where staff discovered that he had an elevated heartbeat. Once returned to jail, Bahri was found dead in the cell he shared with a number of other prisoners a few days later.
The cause of death was officially recorded as: “Difficulty breathing and dehydration.” In the autopsy photographs released by the police, Bahri appears to have bruising to his neck and blood on his face.
Fajar was disappointed by this development.
“That was not my hope,” he says. “I wanted him to repent and change. I didn’t want him dead. Even if I killed him with my bare hands, my son would still be dead. I hit a motorbike the other day, thinking of him [Rangga]. Even animals are not like that. I took care of him and loved him from when he was a baby for 9 years. He took him from me in an instant.”
He adds that he would have forgiven Bahri, if he had lived. And that no one has the right to take a life, except God.
Fajar knows something about repentance and forgiveness.
He is a recovering drug addict, having done several stints in rehab following a fierce addiction to crystal meth. Following his first stay in rehab, the facility asked if he would consider training as a drugs counsellor. He had all the qualities they were looking for, they said, and his personal experience with recovery meant that he would be able to connect with other addicts.
But Fajar was not interested.
“I resisted it at first,” he explains. Once he left rehab, Fajar relapsed. “I was so ashamed,” he says. “So when I got clean again, I became a counsellor. There is so much stigma around addiction in Indonesia, but this is an invisible sickness. You will live with it until you breathe your last breath on this Earth. So I wanted to help others.”
Fajar has since resigned as a counsellor following Rangga’s death. It is just too hard and he is unable to focus.
In the one room that doubles as his home, as Rizky plays on the floor and watches television, Fajar wanders around looking for a pin to open the memory card slot on his phone. Once the memory card is his place, he flips through the photo gallery.
The first photograph shows Rangga wrapped snugly in his funeral shroud, like a sleeping baby. The second photograph is the last one Fajar took of his son. It was 19 September, on Rangga’s 9th birthday, just a few days before he went with his mother to Aceh. Rangga and Rizky stand in front of a chocolate birthday cake, Rangga’s face lit up with joy and the glow of his birthday candles. The third picture is an official school photograph, with Rangga looking handsome in his school uniform.
“My eyes are starting to water,” says Fajar. “I don’t want to look at these anymore.”
He closes the photo gallery.
After Rangga was murdered, he received what was essentially a military style funeral for a civilian, which was attended by the police, local politicians and members of the Acehnese military. Fajar is very proud of this, and at peace with the decision not to bring Rangga’s body back to Medan for burial.
“The local community asked for him to be interred there. They said he was a hero of Aceh,” he explains.
“He was always active and so smart. He especially loved mathematics. And he loved his brother. I have tried to explain to him what has happened. I ask Rizky sometimes, ‘Where is Abang [older brother]?’ and he says ‘He’s dead. He was killed.’ But I’m not sure he really understands,” says Fajar.
“I want to take him to Rangga’s grave when he’s older,” he continues. “I’ll say, “Abang is buried here’.”
“I’ll say, ‘Here’s your brother’.”
Fajar’s mind constantly turns over the sequence of events that led to Rangga’s murder: from the decision to move him to Aceh, to the remote location of the house, to the boy and his mother being at home alone in the early hours of the morning. But more than anything, he says, his mind flips to Bahri—already in prison for murder, yet released to kill again.
“I am angry. People like that should be far away from other people. They are different, so they should be treated differently and carefully monitored,” he says. “With the COVID-19 release programme, more and more people are committing criminal offenses. All the latest cases I have seen in the news have been about people who were released under the scheme.”
“It’s strange, this country. What kind of justice is that?”
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