Indonesia’s top court overturned two police officers’ acquittal over Kanjuruhan stadium crush, but jailed them for only two and 2.5 years.
The officers, Wahyu Setyo Pranoto, the chief of operations of the Malang Regency Police and Bambang Sidik Achmadi, the head of the Prevention Unit of the Malang Regency Police, were cleared of negligence leading to injury or death in March by the Surabaya District Court.
In a statement on Thursday, Indonesia’s Supreme Court said it had overturned the acquittals, instead sentencing the men to two and a half years and two years in prison respectively.
“I am extremely dissatisfied with the verdict. I wanted them to get the death penalty,” Rini Hanifa, whose son, 20-year-old Agus Rian Syah Pratama Putra, died at Kanjuruhan last October, told Al Jazeera.
“The sentences should have been proportional to what they did to my son. This is justice in Indonesia for those who are in power and have power. Their positions won in the end,” she said of the police officers.
There were 135 deaths after police fired tear gas onto the pitch and into the stands at the end of a match between rival teams Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya in Malang on October 1 last year in response to a perceived pitch invasion by fans disappointed with Arema FC’s performance.
In announcing the court’s decision in March, Surabaya District Court judge, Abu Achmad Sidqi Amsya, said that Pranoto and Achmadi had not been legally and convincingly proven guilty of giving orders to fire tear gas, although he sentenced another officer, Hasdarmawan, the commander of the Third Mobile Brigade Company of the East Java Police, to one and a half years in prison for his role in the incident.