The Cebongan Prison Attack

A prison raid after an earlier killing

The four men held at Cebongan were police detainees connected to an earlier confrontation in Yogyakarta in which a Kopassus member, Heru Santoso, had been killed. The later prison raid was therefore investigated as retaliation, but the court—not rumor or public anger—determined the criminal liability of the defendants.

On March 23, a group of soldiers entered the Class IIB Cebongan facility. The raid killed Benyamin Angel Sahetapy, Yohanis Juan Manbait, Adrianus Chandra Galaja and Yermiyanto Rohi Riwu. Prison personnel and inmates were left as witnesses to an attack carried out inside a government detention facility.

The military investigation

An Indonesian Army investigation acknowledged the involvement of Kopassus personnel. Public reporting initially described eleven soldiers as perpetrators, while the military-court proceedings ultimately involved twelve defendants across separate case files. The differing numbers reflect the way authorities described direct participants and the broader set of people prosecuted, rather than evidence of twelve identical roles.

That distinction matters editorially. The military court did not convict every defendant of firing the fatal shots or of the same offense. Some were tried as principal participants, some for assisting the planned killing, and others for supporting conduct connected with the raid.

Premeditated-murder convictions

On September 5, 2013, Military Court II-11 Yogyakarta convicted Ucok Tigor Simbolon, Sugeng Sumaryanto and Kodik of premeditated murder under Article 340 of Indonesia's Criminal Code together with the participation provision. The judgment also found military-law violations.

Ucok received 11 years in prison, Sugeng eight years and Kodik six years. All three were dismissed from the armed forces. The court said the attack had caused four deaths, grief to their families, trauma inside the prison and damage to the military's reputation.

Other soldiers received separate sentences

Five other Kopassus members were convicted of helping the action that led to the deaths and each received one year and nine months. In another proceeding, the soldier who drove the principal attackers received a 15-month sentence. Three other soldiers tried for roles related to the raid received four months and 20 days, time that was effectively covered by their pretrial detention.

These outcomes make the case more accurately described as a set of related convictions than as one undifferentiated group verdict.

Appeals were announced

Immediately after the principal September 5 verdicts, Ucok, Sugeng and Kodik said they would appeal. The reliable sources used for this file clearly establish the trial convictions and sentences, but this page does not claim a specific later appellate disposition that those sources do not document. The recorded first-instance convictions remain the basis for the archive's adjudicated classification.

Timeline

Current status

The killings are not an unidentified-offender mystery: military investigators identified participants and courts entered multiple convictions. At the same time, the trial record assigns different levels of legal responsibility, so this archive does not describe all twelve defendants as killers. The public sources consulted for this page document the 2013 judgments and the defendants' stated intention to appeal; absent a reliable appellate disposition in those sources, no later procedural result is invented here.

Related Indonesia case files