Ahmad Suradji was a dukun, a traditional healer and practitioner of magic, in a village outside Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province in Indonesia. Amnesty International described him in 2008 as a well-known and respected witch doctor whom local women often consulted about money, health and romance. In 1997 police found the remains of 42 women and girls in his village. All had been strangled, according to the reports Amnesty relied on, at various times between 1986 and 1997.
He was arrested on May 2, 1997. A district court in Lubuk Pakam sentenced him to death on April 27, 1998, and the higher courts upheld the sentence the same year. For the next ten years he stayed on death row in Medan while his lawyers asked the president for clemency and the Supreme Court for a review. Both efforts failed. He was shot by a police firing squad on a plantation in Deli Serdang regency on the night of July 10, 2008. When officials tried to bury him in his home village, his neighbors would not let them.
Suradji lived in Dusun Aman Damai, a hamlet in Sei Semayang village, in the Sunggal subdistrict of Deli Serdang regency, on the edge of Medan. The legal news service Hukumonline, in a 2023 review of the case, gives that location; Amnesty International and The Jakarta Post name the same village as Semayang and Aman Damai.
In Indonesia a dukun is a local practitioner who offers healing, charms and spiritual help. Suradji had clients, and many of them were women. Amnesty's appeals in 2008 said that local women often came to him about money, health and romance. The women he killed had come to him, Amnesty said, to seek his help in his capacity as a local witch doctor. A wire report carried by the human-rights organization Hands Off Cain in July 2008 said the same: the women had sought his help with problems of money and love.
Little else about his early life was reported. Ages given for him differ. The Jakarta Post gave his age as 55 in January 2008. Amnesty International gave it as 57 when he was executed six months later. His birth date was not reported.
He was married. His wife Tumini was arrested, tried and convicted as an accomplice in the killings, according to Amnesty International. Hukumonline's account says that his wife was the one who exposed what he had been doing, though it gives no detail of how.
Suradji's own explanation, as reported, was that the killings would strengthen his powers. Hukumonline writes that he acted to strengthen his supernatural power and deepen his practice of black magic, and that he believed he had to kill 72 women. Amnesty International said he was convicted of killings he believed would boost his powers as a witch doctor. A wire report carried by Hands Off Cain in July 2008 called him a self-proclaimed shaman who had killed the women in black-magic rituals, and said he had confessed to strangling most of them.
Hukumonline says that he told of being guided by supernatural whispers. The reports do not say when he said this began.
The victims were women and girls who visited him as clients. Amnesty International reported that 42 bodies were found, and that all of the victims were reportedly strangled by Suradji between 1986 and 1997.
Most of the 42 were not named in the press. The last of them, whose disappearance led to his arrest, appears in Hukumonline's account only under the initials SKD. Amnesty described her as a girl whose relatives grew worried when she did not come home after visiting him. Hukumonline says that she and other people who had been reported missing were reported to have been his clients, and that this was how police traced the case to him.
When he was executed in 2008, a woman in Aman Damai told The Jakarta Post that he had murdered his own neighbors.
In April 1997 a young woman who had gone to see Suradji did not come home. Her relatives became concerned, Amnesty International reported. Hukumonline says that her body was found in Dusun Aman Damai four days after she was killed.
Police traced her to Suradji, and he was arrested on May 2, 1997, according to Amnesty International. Police then uncovered the remains of 42 women and girls in Sei Semayang village. The Jakarta Post, in 2008, said that he had been sentenced after police found the victims' bodies there.
Prosecutors brought the case before the Lubuk Pakam District Court (Pengadilan Negeri Lubuk Pakam), the court for Deli Serdang regency. According to Hukumonline, the charge was murder under Article 338 of the Indonesian Criminal Code (KUHP), read together with Article 64.
Article 338 covers ordinary murder. Article 64 covers what Indonesian law calls a continuing act (perbuatan berlanjut): several offenses committed with a single intent are treated as one series and receive a single penalty. Hukumonline notes that the gaps between the killings varied, but that the court treated them as one series flowing from one intent.
The choice of charge later drew comment. In Hukumonline's 2023 review, Dr. Eva Achjani Zulfa, a criminal-law specialist at the Faculty of Law of the University of Indonesia, argued that Article 340, which covers premeditated murder, would have fit the facts better than Article 338. She also said that it is open to debate whether Article 64 works to make a sentence heavier or lighter, since it folds many offenses into one. Under that rule, Hukumonline explains, all 42 killings were absorbed into a single death sentence. She noted that the new Criminal Code keeps the same rule in its Article 126.
On April 27, 1998, the Lubuk Pakam District Court sentenced Suradji to death for the murders of 42 women and girls. Amnesty International, The Jakarta Post and Hukumonline all give the same court and year, and Amnesty and Hukumonline give the same date.
His wife Tumini was convicted as an accomplice. What happened to her sentence is reported in different ways. The Jakarta Post wrote in January 2008 that she was serving a life sentence for helping in the murders. Amnesty International wrote in July 2008 that she had also been sentenced to death after being convicted as an accomplice, and later that month described her as also on death row, convicted of the same offense. A wire report carried by Hands Off Cain on July 3, 2008, said she had also been sentenced to death and that no date had been set for her execution. No date or court for any reduction has been reported.
Suradji appealed. The Jakarta Post reported that the Medan High Court and the Supreme Court both upheld the death sentence in 1998. Hukumonline gives the date of the Supreme Court's rejection of his cassation appeal (kasasi) as September 14, 1998. With that ruling the conviction and sentence became final.
Under Indonesian law a prisoner sentenced to death may ask the president for clemency (grasi). Accounts of Suradji's petitions are not fully consistent.
Hukumonline says that in 2004, with the help of the Medan Legal Aid Institute (LBH Medan), he petitioned the president for clemency, and that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rejected it on December 27, 2007.
The Jakarta Post gave a fuller account in January 2008. It said that a first clemency letter had been submitted in October 2004 and rejected by the president. Tumini, it said, sent a second clemency letter in December 2007, and the Medan Legal Aid Institute had also written to the president asking for clemency.
Amnesty International reported in January and July 2008 that his appeal for clemency had been rejected in December 2007, and in its statement after the execution it said that the president had refused his second request for clemency in December 2007. The wire report carried by Hands Off Cain in July 2008 also referred to the rejection of a second clemency application.
His lawyers also asked the Supreme Court for a judicial review (peninjauan kembali), Indonesia's last legal remedy after a final judgment. According to The Jakarta Post in January 2008, the defense said it had new evidence: that one of the 42 victims was alive and working in Malaysia. The Medan Legal Aid Institute told the paper it was surprised that the court had not yet considered the request.
No ruling on the review was reported, and no report confirmed that any of the 42 was found alive. Hukumonline's 2023 review does not mention a judicial review at all.
In January 2008 Suradji was being held in Medan, at the prison Amnesty International calls Tandjung Gustan prison. Amnesty said it was likely that the execution would be carried out there.
On January 25, 2008, Amnesty issued an urgent action warning that Suradji was at risk of imminent execution. It cited media reports in which a prosecutor at the Attorney General's Office had confirmed plans to execute him in February 2008, saying that a team would be sent the following week to monitor the execution.
The Jakarta Post reported the same plans from Medan. Prosecutors from the Attorney General's Office and the North Sumatra High Prosecutor's Office were considering February 9 as the date, the paper said; the date had been discussed in a closed meeting, and the execution would probably take place on state plantation land in Deli Serdang. Officials confirmed an execution in February but would not give the exact date, saying that announcing it could have a bad influence on the condemned man.
The February execution did not take place. The reason for the delay was not reported.
Indonesia had not carried out an execution for 14 months when, on June 26, 2008, it executed two Nigerian men convicted of drug trafficking, Amnesty International reported. A wave of further executions followed.
On July 4, Amnesty issued a further warning, reporting that prosecutors were planning his execution in July and that he would be the first of five prisoners expected to be executed that month. On July 10 Amnesty issued a new appeal for four other prisoners, noting that the Deputy Attorney General had said on July 4 that eight prisoners, Suradji among them, would be executed soon because they had exhausted their appeals and clemency pleas. Amnesty said that Indonesia did not publish official death-penalty statistics and that at least 112 people were known to be on death row.
Suradji was executed by a firing squad of the police mobile brigade (Brimob) at 9:58 p.m. on Thursday, July 10, 2008, at a plantation in Deli Serdang regency, North Sumatra, according to Amnesty International. The Jakarta Post described the site as a rubber plantation. Hukumonline identifies the firing squad as the execution team of the Brimob unit of the North Sumatra regional police.
He had been granted his last request, to see his wife Tumini, Amnesty reported.
Amnesty International condemned the execution in a statement the next day. It was the third execution in Indonesia since June 26, Amnesty said. By August 11, 2008, Amnesty counted seven executions since the resumption on June 26.
The authorities had planned to bury Suradji in Aman Damai. The Jakarta Post reported that his neighbors picketed his own backyard to stop the burial there, and blocked the road to stop the ambulance carrying his body. The ambulance was sent instead to a public cemetery near the district office, where local people again refused to allow the burial. He was finally buried in the public cemetery of a neighboring village, in a funeral the paper said lasted about 15 minutes.
His lawyer told the paper that the burial place had been changed to avoid physical clashes. Officials from the prosecutor's office and the district government attended. A woman in Aman Damai told the paper that it would be better simply to throw his body into the river, because he had murdered his own neighbors.
The number of victims is given as 42 in every report, and the court's sentence covered 42 killings. In 2008 his defense claimed that one of the 42 was alive and working in Malaysia. The reports did not confirm the claim, and no ruling on it was reported.
The fate of his wife Tumini's sentence is reported both as death (Amnesty International, July 2008; a wire report carried by Hands Off Cain, July 3, 2008) and as life imprisonment (The Jakarta Post, January 2008). No date or court for a reduction was reported, and her later status is not known from the reports.
The number of women he said he believed he had to kill is given as 72 by Hukumonline. Other reports give no figure.
The dates of his clemency petitions differ slightly: Hukumonline describes one petition, filed in 2004 and rejected on December 27, 2007; The Jakarta Post describes a first letter submitted in October 2004 and rejected, and a second sent by Tumini in December 2007; Amnesty speaks of a second request refused in December 2007.
His age is given as 55 in January 2008 and 57 in July 2008, and his name is spelled both Ahmad (The Jakarta Post, Hukumonline, Hands Off Cain) and Achmad (Amnesty International).
1986 to 1997: Women and girls who consulted Suradji as a dukun are killed, by strangulation; 42 bodies are later found in Sei Semayang village, Deli Serdang.
April 1997: A young woman who visited him does not come home; her body is found in Dusun Aman Damai.
May 2, 1997: Suradji is arrested. Police recover the remains of 42 women and girls in the village.
April 27, 1998: The Lubuk Pakam District Court sentences him to death for the murders of 42 women and girls. His wife Tumini is convicted as an accomplice.
1998: The Medan High Court upholds the sentence.
September 14, 1998: The Supreme Court rejects his cassation appeal (date per Hukumonline).
2004: A clemency petition is submitted to the president with help from the Medan Legal Aid Institute (October 2004 per The Jakarta Post).
December 2007: President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rejects clemency (December 27 per Hukumonline). Tumini sends a further clemency letter.
January 2008: Prosecutors consider February 9 for the execution; Amnesty International issues an urgent action. The defense seeks a judicial review, claiming one victim is alive in Malaysia.
June 26, 2008: Indonesia resumes executions after 14 months.
July 2, 2008: The Attorney General's Office says five death-row prisoners, including Suradji, will be executed that month.
July 10, 2008, 9:58 p.m.: Suradji is executed by a Brimob firing squad at a plantation in Deli Serdang.
After the execution: Neighbors in Aman Damai block his burial in the village; he is buried in a neighboring village's public cemetery.
September 22, 2023: Hukumonline publishes a review of the legal debate over the charge used in his case.