Рет қаралды 1,062,285
(4 Oct 2000) Natural Sound
Indonesian police have arrested the notorious East Timorese militia leader Eurico Guterres for ordering members of his gang to defy attempts by Indonesian security forces to disarm them.
National Police Chief Suroyo Bimantoro accused Guterres of telling hundreds of his men to hide rather than give up their weapons.
It's the first clear sign Indonesia will fulfill its promise to the international community to disarm militias from Timor.
Eurico Guterres was looking comfortable outside the Attorney General's office in Jakarta on Tuesday.
On Wednesday he was under arrest.
The arrest came two days after his name was added to a list of suspects accused of orchestrating the wave of violence that swept East Timor 13 months ago when its people overwhelmingly voted in a U.N.-supervised ballot to break free from Indonesian rule.
His detention also coincided with the return of President Abdurrahman Wahid from a foreign tour on Wednesday.
Last week Wahid demanded that Guterres be detained after the militia leader's men clashed with security forces and tried to seize back weapons they had earlier surrendered to police.
Guterres heads the Aitarak militia group, that took a leading role in the violence that engulfed East Timor last year.
His gang, aided by sections of the Indonesian military, ruthlessly sacked and burned much of the capital, Dili.
When international peacekeepers arrived to restore order a few weeks later, he and hundreds of other anti-independence militiamen fled to Indonesian West Timor, where they seized control of a string of border camps and terrorized thousands of refugees there.
Only last month, he addressed protestors opposed to East Timor's independence in the West Timorese city of Kupang.
On Tuesday the New-York-based Human Rights Watch described Guterres as the "one of the key thugs behind the violence in East Timor."
Indonesian authorities investigating last year's violence in East Timor have implicated him in the massacre of refugees sheltering in a Dili home in April 1999.
Find out more about AP Archive: www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter: / ap_archive
Facebook: / aparchives
Instagram: / apnews
You can license this story through AP Archive: www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...