Australian shot dead at Freeport mine in Indonesia
JAKARTA, Indonesia — An Australian working for U.S. mining giant Freeport in Indonesia’s restive Papua province was shot and killed Saturday, possibly by a sniper, police and company officials said.
The shooting happened near the Grasberg site, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, where two Americans were killed in an ambush in 2002.
Papua, a desperately poor and militarized province on Indonesia’s easternmost tip, is home to separatist rebels who denounce PT Freeport as a symbol of Jakarta’s rule. There has been a surge in attacks in recent months that has left several people dead.
Three rebel suspects were detained later Saturday after a shootout with soldiers and police in Yapen, 270 miles (440 kilometers) northwest of the mine, said military spokesman Sagom Tamboen.
No one was hurt, and security forces seized documents and weapons, he said.
The men were probably too far away to have carried out the attack, but the military was determining “whether they are linked or not with the shooting incident,” Tamboen said.
Earlier, PT Freeport said in a statement that the victim was traveling near the mine when his car came under fire.
“A shot was fired and a bullet struck a … vehicle, fatally wounding one employee riding in the back seat,” said the subsidiary of the U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. “Other passengers were not injured.”
Papua police chief Bagus Ekodanto said the victim was a 29-year-old Australian technical expert who was shot five times in the chest, neck and stomach.
An anti-terror squad was deployed in search of several suspects, he said, and a 40-member team of forensics specialists and other police investigators would arrive Sunday.
Freeport did not identify the person killed.
“Most likely it was carried out by a sniper,” said national police spokesman Nanan Sukarna, noting that three other passengers, two of them foreigners, were unhurt. The fatal shots were fired from distant hills, he said, where several bullet casings were recovered.
The victim was taken to a hospital in Kuala Kencana, a local mining town, but had already died of his injuries, he said.
The Indonesian government does not allow foreign media to freely report in Papua, where it has tens of thousands of troops. The site of Saturday’s shooting was inaccessible to local reporters.
The Grasberg mining complex is one of the world’s largest single producers of copper and gold, the company says on its Web site. Open-pit mining at the site began in 1990 and is expected to continue until mid-2015.
The mining operation has been a constant source of friction with local Papuans angered over the outflow of profit to foreign investors, while they remain poor. Freeport has extracted billions of dollars in gold from the mine.
Security was raised around the mine Saturday and business activities were not disrupted, said company spokesman Mindo Pangaribuan.
In 2002, two American schoolteachers were killed when their car came under fire at Freeport’s facility in an attack initially blamed on Indonesian soldiers. Details of the incident remain unclear.
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