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ormer State Intelligence Agency (BIN) chief AM Hendropriyono has threatened to sue those who have alleged he was involved in the murder of leading human rights activist Munir Said Thalib.

'€œI'€™ll take the necessary legal steps. It is libel. I had nothing to do with Munir. Why should I kill him? He wasn'€™t a big-time criminal. It would have been easy to eliminate him, if I'€™d wanted to,'€ Hendropriyono told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

He was responding to a statement by campaigners who have made a fresh call for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to immediately act upon recommendations by a government fact-finding team investigating the killing of Munir.

The rights activists specifically called on Yudhoyono to follow up on a recommendation to examine the role of Hendropriyono.

The groups issued their statement earlier this week in response to the ruling by the Supreme Court, which reduced the sentence of Pollycarpus Budihari Prijanto, convicted of murdering Munir, to 14 years after the court had increased it to 20 years in 2008 following an appeal by the Attorney General'€™s Office (AGO).

The recommendations, which the team originally submitted to Yudhoyono in 2005, called for the establishment of a more powerful team to carry out an investigation into BIN and a further examination of the alleged roles of Hendropriyono and BIN'€™s former deputy head, Muchdi Purwopranjono, in the murder in addition to other suspects, including the former president of state-owned flag carrier Garuda Indonesia and its former corporate vice president of security, Ramelgia Anwar.

The fact-finding team also suggested that Yudhoyono instruct the National Police to audit its team assigned to investigate the case in order to speed up its work.

'€œNothing significant has been conducted to follow up [on the recommendations]. We are reviewing the [2005] report by the fact-finding team in order to challenge any rulings regarding the case, including the recent one by the Supreme Court,'€ Usman Hamid, a former member of the fact-finding team, told the Post earlier this week.

Usman said that supporters of Munir were preparing to challenge a 2008 ruling by the South Jakarta District Court that acquitted Muchdi of instructing Pollycarpus to murder Munir.

In its report, the fact-finding team revealed that Pollycarpus had several times contacted a BIN telephone number. The number used Direct Inward Dialling (DID) technology, which meant it could only be reached with the permission of the owner. The team found that the number belonged to Muchdi.

'€œThis refutes any claim by BIN officials that the institution had no connection to PBP,'€ the report says, referring to Pollycarpus'€™ initials.

The report further alleges that Hendropriyono was responsible for the murder due to the '€œcompartment'€ system used within the institution. This gave free rein to any deputy leading a division within BIN to conduct operations as well as to recruit members without answering to anyone other than the chief.

Hendropriyono denied the existence of a compartment system and said that Munir'€™s supporters had been misled by Hollywood fiction.

'€œIt'€™s only a theory. The fact-finding team learned about it from films. The compartment system is used only in clandestine operations. BIN is no clandestine organization,'€ Hendropriyono said.

According to the report, the compartment system also allowed the BIN chief to decide whether or not a particular recruitment or operation should be recorded; a practice which could have led to the lack of evidence of Pollycarpus'€™ recruitment by BIN.

In 2005, President Yudhoyono expressed his disappointment over Hendropriyono'€™s refusal to be questioned by the fact-finding team, but Yudhoyono has said nothing since to endorse tougher measures against Hendropriyono, who was his senior in the military.

'€œIt'€™s time to do something about the report. The government must stop ignoring it,'€ said activist Poengky Indarti from human rights watchdog Imparsial who testified against Muchdi in the 2008 trial.