On 15 April 1987, a mass stabbing took place in two villages in Banyuwangi Regency, Indonesia. Wirjo, a rice farmer, killed twenty people and injured twelve others before committing suicide.[1]
The first attack took place in the morning hours at Wirjo's home in the Watu Buncul neighbourhood[2] of Banjarsari[id], part of Glagah, Banyuwangi[id].[3] At the back of the house, Wirjo was sharpening a jombret[4] and a sickle while in the front of the residence, Wirjo's four-year-old adopted son Renny was playing in a sand dune with a girl of the same age, Arbaiyah. After a while, Wirjo, who had periodically come from behind the house to check on the children, suddenly ran at them wielding both tools. Renny avoided the first swing of the sickle, after which Wirjo attacked Arbaiyah, killing her by slashing her throat, nearly decapitating the girl. Renny was able to flee the scene through a rice field, where he found his adoptive mother (Wirjo's wife) and told her what happened. The mother and child returned to confront Wirjo, who just stared at them and walked away. The pair went off to report the incident to authorities.[5][3][4]
Wirjo went to the next-door home of Maskur and his wife Mursiyah. Entering through the back of the house, Wirjo snuck up on Mursiyah as she was cooking rice in the kitchen and slashed her throat from behind. Maskur heard the attack from the living room and attempted to intervene, but he was also fatally struck in the neck. By this point, other neighbours had become aware of Wirjo's attacks and fled their homes, informing other residents of the ongoing murders. As a result, several other villagers came to the scene to look for Wirjo. The search party briefly found and chased after Wirjo after Gimin, a villager who survived an attack without injury, alerted them to his presence. The group lost sight of Wirjo as he fled west into the rice fields, near the Galung river, where they discovered the body of Isah, who was killed with the sickle as she was trimming the fields. The group spotted Wirjo walking in the distance and went in his direction, finding two dead elderly people, Suwendah and Taman, in the fields. Like the previous victims, they had died from cuts to the neck. The group subsequently stopped the search effort to bring the bodies back to the village. They found nine additional corpses in the rice fields, all farmers who were killed while working.[5][6]
Wirjo eventually left the fields and entered Boyolangu[id], part of Giri[id]. On the path near the embankment, he fatally slashed the throat of Istianah, a Sekolah Menengah Pertama student at Kosgoro Middle School, as the girl was walking the opposite direction. Wirjo was spotted by residents, led by rukun tetangga head Temu,and chased into the residential area. Wirjo escaped the group, but was confronted in the backyard of Djam'i, a People's Security (Kamra) militaman. Although the two men knew each other, Wirjo did not respond to questions and attacked Djam'i, who, as a trained silat fighter, was able to fend off the attack with several kicks, although losing two fingers while blocking the machete.[5][6] Wirjo continued to kill others in the area, with the final victim being Suindah Rasmani, who was slashed in the back of the neck while harvesting coconuts and died on the way to the hospital.[7]
During the killings, security forces ordered the evacuation of Banjarsari and Boyolangu. Those who elected to stay were asked to gather in groups of ten families at the residence of a neighbour or relative, with the women and children to barricade themselves inside while the men guarded the house with sharpened bamboo sticks, clubs and machetes.[6] Schools in the area were closed for the day, but reopened the next morning.[8]
Police backup only arrived after Wirjo had already disappeared from Boyolangu. The manhunt began in the evening and was led by Indonesian National Police Major General Subagyo[id], in the forests of Banyuwangi. Police made use of search dogs[9] and were also aided by the Indonesian National Armed Forces.[10] The following day, at around 10:00, Besuki Regional Police Chief Colonel Momo Kelana and his troop found Wirjo's body between the villages of Concrong and Jatibesar, around 2 miles (3km) west of his house. He had committed suicide by hanging with a cloth belt, reported as either a setagen or kain, which he had tied around the roots of a tree, positioned on a cliff 2.5 metres (8.2ft) above a river. Rather than collect Wirjo's body for burial, the officers shot the makeshift noose and let the body get swept away by the currents, with many villagers gathering to watch around the stream for the body, which was eventually retrieved.[3][5][6] When the discovery was first announced, Sukar, a guard in nearby Kemiren and the son of the killed woman Suindah, believed that Wirjo had been found alive and set out to challenge him in a one-to-one machete fight, having to be restrained and told of the actual circumstances.[7] Over the following days, police distributed flyers around Banyuwangi to ensure everyone was aware of Wirjo's death. After a post-mortem examination, the remains were returned to Wirjo's family, who buried the body in the family cemetery, next to his father, with the funeral being watched by thousands of locals.[3][5][6]
Victims
By the end of the day Wirjo had attacked a total of 32 people, 19 in Banjarsari and 13 in Boyolangu.[3] Most of the victims were farmers on their way to the rice fields or children on their way to school.[11] Of the 20 fatalities, 18 were dead at the scene, while two others died of their wounds at the hospital.[5] All of them were brought to Blambangan[id] General Hospital in Banyuwangi town. Due to the remote location of the villages, many of the victims were transported with pick-up trucks or motorcycles.[2] All of them were slashed in the neck, although wounds were often present all over the body, head, and limbs. Blambangan hospital was overwhelmed with the number of casualties, leading to scheduled surgeries being cancelled and requiring some patients having to lie on mats on the floor. Additional medical staff had to be called from the mountains, as there weren't enough doctors even as the intern nurses substituted for them, with some officers of the national police and army soldiers aiding as well.[2][12] Treatment of some of the injured was still ongoing as of 25 April.[5]
An officer of the Banyuwangi Regency Government Community Protection took photographs of all casualties at the hospital and later of Wirjo's body as it was discovered the day after the murders. The photos, numbering around 36, were then gifted to Balambangan Hospital head surgeon Suherman as historical mementos. Suherman elected to keep most of the images private within the community between himself and Wirjo's family, kept at the family home in Boyolangu's Watu Buncul neighbourhood.[2][12]
Suwirjo, better known as Wirjo,[6] was born as the fifth of nine children, as a member of the local OsingJavanese.[5] On 1 July 1976,[4] he married his wife Indarah. Besides the adopted Renny, the couple had no children.[5] Wirjo was formerly employed as a forklift operator at a paper company, but was fired after intentionally ramming a forklift into a wall, subsequently working on his brother's rice fields.[13] At the time of the murders, Wirjo was 42 years old and his wife was 32.[5]
According to Indarah, unlike his siblings, who were also farmers, her husband had a reputation for being self-centered, arrogant and bad-tempered, being known for drinking a lot of alcohol, gambling frequently and "playing around" with other women. Due to this, his family questioned whether he would remain included in their mother's inheritance.[5][10] Wirjo's family had been fairly wealthy, but Wirjo became poor after wasting his father's inheritance through his gambling and drinking habits, which resulted in frequent arguments with other family members.[10][13] Indarah stated that Wirjo reacted violently when his personal issues were mentioned, threatening her with the sickle. He had made similar death threats against his mother and siblings, having once attempted to attack his mother with a keris.[13] The night before the murders, Indarah was beaten by Wirjo, causing her to leave to go live at her parents' house in a different village.[4][5]
Local rumours from before the murders claimed that Wirjo had developed supernatural powers through kanuragan, a Javanese form of ritualistic magic, due to which it was believed that Wirjo was immune to being cut, able to dematerialize or go invisible and capable of bilocation.[3][6] Before his marriage, Wirjo had engaged in a two-year tirakat, a tariqa-derived form of asceticism, claiming he had spent this time without sleeping and learnt magic spells.[3] Police mentioned that while they did not have a motive, they ruled out terrorism, which was initially considered due to the 1987 Indonesian legislative election on 23 April, also noting Wirjo that was suspected of being mentally ill before.[6] Wirjo was already known as an eccentric in the village, having once tranquilized a cow, which he considered too weak during plowing, by letting it get bit red-tailed green ratsnake before slaughter. Local food vendors also remembered him for his large appetite, recalling that he once ate 5 kilograms (11lb) of fried rice by himself, which contributed to Wirjo's pre-existing reputation as someone inhuman.[13] Modern media reports attribute the murders to Wirjo's bad character traits and inability to control his emotions.[10][13]
Myths and misinformation
The massacre has become subject of urban legends, particularly regarding Wirjo's rumoured supernatural powers, primarily his supposed invincibility. His grave is often visited by locals and his death site, which has become less isolated due to the expansion of the surrounding rice fields, is regarded as haunted by some Banjasari inhabitants.[10][13]
Bernama and Reuters reported that Wirjo had fasted for a month[9][11] (specified as forty days by Indonesian media)[10][13] before the murders and shortly before the attacks, he had supposedly dug up the remains of his mother in Banjarsari's graveyard and gnawed at the bones,[9][11] despite her still being alive at the time of the murders.[4] This was derived from a more mundane occurance, where Wirjo had reburied his father's body and shroud in a different part of the cemetery a month earlier, an experience that apparently left him feeling uneasy and caused him to go to his mother's home to cry.[3] Other early false reports claimed that Wirjo had also killed his wife and his adopted son,[9][11] and that he drank the blood of the latter. This particular claim is believed to stem from Wirjo's know preference for eating dried cow's blood.[10]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
