Jakarta. Prosecutors on Monday lashed out at murder defendant Putri Candrawathi who they said had invented a story that she had been raped by Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat, who was murdered on July 8 of last year allegedly on the order of her husband.

Putri is facing eight years in prison for allegedly becoming an accessory in the murder which saw husband Ferdy Sambo, a former police general and superior of the victim, as the prime suspect.

During an emotional hearing at the South Jakarta District Court, prosecutors told the panel of judges that Putri had changed her version of the backdrop to the situation that led to Yosua’s murder.

In the initial investigation, Putri claimed that Yosua had harassed her at Ferdy’s official residence in Jakarta, the scene where an unarmed Yosua was shot multiple times by a fellow officer.

She then changed the story by claiming that she was raped at a house in Magelang where Putri accompanied by Yosua and several other Ferdy’s assistants came to visit her son who studied in the Central Java town, prosecutors said.

“The modification in her stories is like a sequel which contains nothing more but illusions and a sinister plot,” one of the prosecutors said, reading out the statement in turn.

In the previous hearing, Putri in her defense claimed that she was raped by Yosua in Magelang a day before the murder.

“Whenever I spoke, there were comments from analysts who didn’t witness the actual incident themselves. But they said I was not a victim of sexual violence because I’m still able to speak up,” she told the court last week. 

“I have really endured sexual violence and attacks committed by Yosua,” she added.

But prosecutors didn’t buy her claim and pointed out that she had never visited a forensic doctor to support the rape claim -- simply because she was dishonest about it.

They also criticized Putri’s defense team for “advising the defendant to become dishonest” and falsely portraying the slain officer as a “cruel and immoral person”.

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Despite pressures from the defense to bring argumentation to the rape claim, they couldn’t establish any evidence that the sexual violence actually happened, prosecutor Zulkarnain said.

“The attorneys think they are the smartest persons here but they are unable to show any proof,” he continued.

Prosecutors earlier ruled out sexual violence as the motive for Yosua’s murder although they assumed that Putri might have been involved in a love affair with the murder victim.

But a senior prosecutor at the Attorney General’s Office said that while the adultery topic may spice up the trial, prosecutors’ focus remained on the murder case.

"There is no obligation for us to prove that the adultery did occur. The motive is not a key issue as long as we can establish evidence [of the murder]," Deputy Attorney General Fadil Zumhana said earlier.

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