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uspended Bekasi mayor and graft convict Mochtar Mohamad was taken to Sukamiskin Penitentiary in Bandung, West Java, on Wednesday night after refusing to turn himself in to the authorities to serve his six-year prison sentence.

He was flown from Bali where he was arrested earlier in the day.

Mochtar had previously refused to hand himself in to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) twice, saying that he had not received an official copy of an appellate court ruling that found him guilty of four graft counts centering on the management of the Bekasi budget.

Mochtar’s whereabouts were unknown for days before he was finally arrested at Villa Lalu in a trendy tourist area in Bali at around 11 a.m.

A KPK team later escorted Mochtar to Jakarta by commercial flight and transferred him to Bandung by car. They arrived at Sukamiskin at around 7 p.m.

Early this month, a Supreme Court appellate panel ruled in favor of the KPK after the Bandung Corruption Court acquitted Mochtar in a controversial ruling in October last year.

Mochtar’s acquittal was the KPK’s first defeat in a graft court trial since the KPK’s establishment in 2003. Prior to the case, all graft defendants whose cases were handled by the KPK had been sent to prison.

Mochtar’s case was also the first KPK graft case to have been tried at a regional corruption court since the enactment of the 2009 Anticorruption Law, which mandates that all local corruption cases be tried in local tribunals.

Instead of immediately arresting and putting Mochtar in jail after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the KPK opted to wait for Mochtar to turn himself in. It sent two letters to Mochtar, telling him to return to jail before the KPK deployed a team to track down Mochtar on Tuesday night in order to force him to serve his sentence.

KPK spokesperson Johan Budi confirmed the arrest, saying that the KPK team had locked Mochtar up in Sukamiskin Penitentiary.

A team consisting of personnel from the KPK, the police and the Bali bomb squad arrested the suspended Bekasi mayor, who had used a different name, Mochammad Yamin, to check into room No. 10 at Villa Lalu in Seminyak, where he had been staying since Monday.

At the villa, Mochtar wrote down his ID card number and signed the guest book, but did not surrender his ID card.

The US$100-a-night villa provides moderately luxurious facilities, including swimming pool, bedroom and guest room. Dewi said that the villa was usually rented by locals and foreigners on honeymoon.

Since checking in, Mochtar seldom went out of his room. He ordered room service from the front office.

Sira Prayuna, Mochtar’s lawyer, insisted that his client had not intended to refute the sentence, but that there was no legal basis to abide by it as the official copy of the ruling was still on its way to the KPK.

Separately on Wednesday, another graft defendant, former Sragen regent Untung Wiyono, was acquitted by local graft tribunal the Semarang Corruption Court in Central Java.

Peni Widarti and Ainur Rohmah contributed to this story