Parents mourn loss of

daughter 
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Jakarta | Wed, September 24 2014, 10:58 AM
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The parents of murder victim 19-year-old Ade Sara Angelina Suroto provided tearful
testimony at the murder trial of former lovers Ahmad Imam Al Hafitd and Assyifa
Ramadhani at the Central Jakarta District Court on Tuesday.

“We have lost a daughter who had a bright future. I lost my bloodline after Sara’s death,” the
victim’s mother, Elisabeth Diana, told the panel of judges through her tears.

Sara was her parents’ only child.

Assyifa immediately burst into tears as she heard those words.

Previously, prosecutors indicted Hafitd and Assyifa under multiple articles of the Criminal
Code, including Article 340, which stipulates a maximum of 20 years’ imprisonment for
premeditated murder.

According to the indictment, the two defendants planned to kidnap Sara, Hafitd’s ex-
girlfriend, after Assyifa discovered a text message from Sara on Hafitd’s phone. 

They then picked Sara up on her way to an extracurricular class at the Goethe-Institut in
Central Jakarta before torturing her — gagging her, inflicting electric shocks and beating her
for hours — in Hafitd’s car on March 3.

Elisabeth described her exchanges with Sara about her previous relationship with Hafitd.
She said that before the incident, Hafitd often insulted Sara on social media platform
Twitter. Hafitd has denied this.

As the panel of judges asked Elisabeth questions about her testimony, she often turned to
the defendants and begged them to confess.

“When I say I have forgiven them, it means that I do not want to judge them. Let the law do
its work,” she said, adding that she hoped the judges would give the defendants a fitting
punishment. 

Separately, the victim’s father, Suroto, described the pain he felt when the police first
informed him about finding his daughter’s body on the side of a road.

“It was harder when I had to go to identify the body. I could not recognize her as everything
was damaged. But I could still recognize my daughter’s slender fingers,” he said.

An autopsy carried out at the Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta
suggested that Sara had died from asphyxiation, as there was paper stuffed in her throat
and there were indications she had experienced difficulty breathing. 

Suroto said that as soon as his daughter went missing, he spread the news on social media
to her friends and also tried to call her cellular phone operator to trace her.

Three other witnesses testified in court on Tuesday. Sara’s friend at the extracurricular
class, Nadia A. Pritami, who was the last to contact her through mobile messaging
application Whatsapp, and two of Hafitd’s university classmates who helped him fix his car
the day after Sara died. 

One of the classmates, Galan, claimed he saw Sara’s body in the car. “When I asked Hafitd
whose body it was, he just said it was a corpse. We didn’t question him further because he
was always joking,” Galan said. (fss)