An Indonesian man has admitted to the police that he fired shots during an ambush that killed two US schoolteachers in the province of Papua in 2002, but also said he saw three men in Indonesian military uniforms firing at the teachers' convoy as well, his lawyer said on Friday.
The accused, Anthonius Wamang, who has been indicted in Washington in connection with the killings and was lured to his arrest by FBI agents on Wednesday, also told the police that he had been given his bullets by a senior Indonesian soldier, Wamang's lawyer, Albert Rumbekwan, said in a telephone interview from Papua.
The shootings, on a road owned by the US company Freeport-McMoRan, which runs the world's largest gold mine in the area, have for years been a stumbling block to the efforts of US President George W. Bush's administration to improve relations with Indonesia.
The US had severed relations for 12 years with the Indonesia military over human rights abuses. Prior to restoring those ties in November, Bush administration officials consistently sought to absolve the Indonesian military of any link to the killings.
Wamang's confession contradicts public statements by Bush administration officials that there was no military involvement.
For Freeport, based in New Orleans, the killings have been troubling. The teachers worked at a Freeport school and were returning from a picnic. At the time, Freeport was paying Indonesian soldiers and military units to protect its facilities, according to company records recently obtained by the New York Times.
Since the 1960s, the company has operated in a sometimes uneasy coexistence with local Papuans as well as the military in the restive province. In the past, Indonesian soldiers and disgruntled Papuans have acted together against Freeport, at one point orchestrating riots to extract greater benefits from its massive operations, according to accounts from former and current employees.
Wamang's statements now suggest that this same loose coalition may also have responsible for the killing of the teachers, Edwin Burgon, 71, and Ricky Lynn Spier, 44.
Wamang, a member of a Papuan separatist group, told the police he emptied one magazine from an M-16 into the windows of the teachers' vehicle, Rumbekwan said. When he finished, he said, he was surprised to see the three men, in uniforms and masks, firing from another angle, Wamang told the police, according to his lawyer.
Wamang and 11 other suspects were detained on Wednesday after being lured by the FBI to a small hotel in Papua, the Amole II in the town of Timika.
"We believed we were going to the US," Viktus Wanmang, a 57-year-old farmer who was among those detained, said in a telephone interview. He was released, along with three others, on Friday. The remaining eight are still being held.
He and the others had been told that they would be interviewed about the teachers' case in the US, because it would be safer for them there, said Wanmang and Denny Yomaki, an official with the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy in Papua. The men were told their families would be given about US$70 for each day they were away, Yomaki said.
They arrived with their bags packed, Wanmang and Yomaki said. But when they reached the hotel, they were instead greeted by two FBI agents, and a third person, who some of the men thought was a Freeport employee, Yomaki said.
The FBI agents hustled the men into a windowless truck.
"The car was driven at high speeds," said Wanmang. The FBI agents sat in front.
"When we stopped, when the car door opened, there was a group of police waiting," he added.
The US embassy declined to comment on the circumstances of their capture, or about Wamang's assertion that the military may have been involved in the teachers' killings.
None of the men have been charged with crimes, except Wamang, who has been indicted in the US on two counts of murder and eight counts of attempted murder.
Eight US citizens were wounded in the ambush, and an Indonesian teacher was killed, along with the two US teachers.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS