Conviction Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship Traditional healing practitioners Lubuk Pakam, North Sumatra, Indonesia · 1998

Indonesia: dukun executed after 42 murders of women who came to him for spiritual help

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

Conviction and death sentence upheld through the Medan High Court and Supreme Court.

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

dukun (traditional healer and sorcerer) with a standing client base

Organization

No organization assigned

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

CORE: the victims were his own clients — women who came to a healer for help and were killed inside the ritual frame that brought them to him.

Spiritual healing or treatment
Ritual, oath, or initiation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

1998-04-27 · conviction affirmed at every level; executed

Lubuk Pakam District Court; Medan High Court; Supreme Court of Indonesia. Ahmad Suradji, a dukun practising near Medan, was convicted on 27 April 1998 of forty-two counts of premeditated murder — women and girls drawn from his healing clientele, buried to the waist and strangled in a rite he told investigators was meant to increase his mystical powers. The conviction was upheld by the Medan High Court and the Indonesian Supreme Court, and he was executed on 10 July 2008.

Documented coercion mechanisms

victims drawn from his own healing clientele
ritual burial to the waist before strangulation, performed as a rite to increase his mystical power

Cited record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting case history report The Jakarta Post: reporting on the case and the pending execution.: National paper of record.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/01/28/fate-039dukun-as039-be-decided.html Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: case-history-report. SHA-256 777c9fac780d84a5400b4c24702f7d28a805868c2274a545c86856b80572b2ee
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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