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Aid Worker Recounts Escape From Execution In Indonesia's Aceh
JAKARTA (AFP) - A human rights worker has given a chilling account of narrowly escaping a group execution in Indonesia's Aceh province in which four people, including three colleagues, were shot dead.
Nazaruddin, 22, a volunteer worker with the Rehabilitation Action for Torture Victims in Aceh (RATA), said Tuesday the executioners were armed informants accompanied by men he thought were Indonesian soldiers.
After being rounded up with the others, he escaped through tall grass as the men shot dead three colleagues and a local resident of the violence-plagued province.
Lying on the northwestern tip of Sumatra island, largely-Muslim Aceh has been gripped by a violent war between separatist fighters from the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and Indonesian troops since the 1970s.
Nazaruddin said he had been in a car in north Aceh with fellow RATA workers he named as Ernita, 23, Idris, 27, and Bachtiar, 24, on December 6th when they were pulled over by a convoy of plainclothesmen.
He said all the men in the convoy of three vehicles - known informants led by a man called Ampon Thayeb and men he suspected were soldiers - were armed.
"Thayeb ordered us to get out of the car, as the three other informants pointed their guns at us," he told reporters at the RATA office in Jakarta.
They were also told to hand over their wallets, watches and other valuables.
At gunpoint, the four were accused of divulging information about human rights abuses during a six-month "humanitarian pause" truce now in its final month, of "stirring up the people" and of only helping victims of military violence.
"We explained that we were not political but humanitarian workers. Thayeb said we were lying, because the area was known as a GAM base and no one would be brave enough to go there, implying that we had to be GAM."
They were later ordered out of the cars and beaten bloody with rifle butts while one of the armed men filmed the event, he said.
The convoy then drove through several military command posts, where the suspected plainclothes soldiers spoke with uniformed soldiers, including a commander.
"Thayeb asked him where he should get rid of us, saying 'Should we finish them off here?'" The commander told him 'No, not here.'"
The convoy then went to a forest, on the way seizing a local man named Rusliy. At the forest, Thayeb told the aid workers they had 15 minutes to confess.
"One of us said 'What can we confess, we are just volunteers?' 'Then it's clear you want to die,' Thayeb replied," Nazaruddin said.
Near a ruined house, Ernita and Idris were shot in the head, with the cameraman still filming, he said.
He escaped by running hard shortly after he, Bachtiar and Rusli were ordered out of the car.
"I later heard two shots as I took off, and believe that Bachtiar and Rusli were killed then. The men opened fire on me as I was running and emptied a full magazine trying to hit me."
New York-based Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Joe Saunders, said it was "one of the rare cases in Aceh in which a victim has come forward and publicly identified the perpetrator."
"The Indonesian government can have no excuse for failing to arrest and prosecute Ampon Thayeb and his army backers."
The group also called on Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid to invite U.N. specialists on torture, arbitrary execution, and human rights defenders to conduct an independent assessment of rights abuses in Aceh.
Wahid on Monday condemned the executions saying they had aggravated the situation in Aceh and become an "international issue...very harmful for us."
But police chief General Suroyo Bimantoro, talking after a cabinet meeting here, ignored press queries on the incident and instead accused GAM for the continuing violence in Aceh.
"Attacks, shootings and kidnappings committed by GAM are still continuing," Bimantoro said.
An Aceh rights group said last week that at least 841 people had been killed in Aceh this year, more than twice the previous year's toll. Civilians made up more than two-thirds of the dead.
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