Posted on 02/11/2010 6:43:14 PM PST by Pan_Yan
JAKARTA — The sacked chief of Indonesia's anti-corruption commission was sentenced to 18 years' jail for murder on Thursday after a trial dismissed as a sham by his supporters.
Former Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) chief Antasari Azhar, 56, had been facing the death penalty in a trial that has been televised live across the nation almost every week for four months.
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The case has gripped Indonesia since Azhar's arrest on May 4 last year for allegedly organising the murder of businessman Nasrudin Zulkarnaen, his suspected rival for the affections of 22-year-old golf caddy Rhani Juliani.
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Conspiracy theories have also flourished since police and prosecutors were caught on KPK wiretaps allegedly plotting to frame two other senior anti-graft investigators, exposing what Yudhoyono later called a "mafia" in the heart of the nation's judicial system.
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Much of the prosecution's indictment consisted of lewd details about a supposed hotel-room tryst between Juliani, Zulkarnaen's second wife, and Azhar, who allegedly killed the businessman to stop him exposing the affair.
Azhar admits he met Juliani in the hotel room to discuss his golf club membership, but he denies demanding sex and says the encounter was a set-up to extort money from him.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
The standards followed in this particular court were the equal of anything you might find in Latin America, or most of Western Europe, and certainly more than Eastern or Southern Europe under communism.
Not to defend them ~ they could do better ~ but Indonesia's problems aren't the absence of civilization but the absence of wealth. These people are dirt poor.
I was just savoring the irony of the anti corruption czar being convicted of murder. Indonesia has lots of problems. Stuff like this is just a symptom.
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