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he parents of murder victim 19-year-old Ade Sara Angelina Suroto provided tearful testimony at the murder trial of former lovers Ahmad Imam Al Hafitd and Assyifa Ramadhani at the Central Jakarta District Court on Tuesday.

'€œWe have lost a daughter who had a bright future. I lost my bloodline after Sara'€™s death,'€ the victim'€™s mother, Elisabeth Diana, told the panel of judges through her tears.

Sara was her parents'€™ only child.

Assyifa immediately burst into tears as she heard those words.

Previously, prosecutors indicted Hafitd and Assyifa under multiple articles of the Criminal Code, including Article 340, which stipulates a maximum of 20 years'€™ imprisonment for premeditated murder.

According to the indictment, the two defendants planned to kidnap Sara, Hafitd'€™s ex-girlfriend, after Assyifa discovered a text message from Sara on Hafitd'€™s phone.

They then picked Sara up on her way to an extracurricular class at the Goethe-Institut in Central Jakarta before torturing her '€” gagging her, inflicting electric shocks and beating her for hours '€” in Hafitd'€™s car on March 3.

Elisabeth described her exchanges with Sara about her previous relationship with Hafitd. She said that before the incident, Hafitd often insulted Sara on social media platform Twitter. Hafitd has denied this.

As the panel of judges asked Elisabeth questions about her testimony, she often turned to the defendants and begged them to confess.

'€œWhen I say I have forgiven them, it means that I do not want to judge them. Let the law do its work,'€ she said, adding that she hoped the judges would give the defendants a fitting punishment.

Separately, the victim'€™s father, Suroto, described the pain he felt when the police first informed him about finding his daughter'€™s body on the side of a road.

'€œIt was harder when I had to go to identify the body. I could not recognize her as everything was damaged. But I could still recognize my daughter'€™s slender fingers,'€ he said.

An autopsy carried out at the Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta suggested that Sara had died from asphyxiation, as there was paper stuffed in her throat and there were indications she had experienced difficulty breathing.

Suroto said that as soon as his daughter went missing, he spread the news on social media to her friends and also tried to call her cellular phone operator to trace her.

Three other witnesses testified in court on Tuesday. Sara'€™s friend at the extracurricular class, Nadia A. Pritami, who was the last to contact her through mobile messaging application Whatsapp, and two of Hafitd'€™s university classmates who helped him fix his car the day after Sara died.

One of the classmates, Galan, claimed he saw Sara'€™s body in the car. '€œWhen I asked Hafitd whose body it was, he just said it was a corpse. We didn'€™t question him further because he was always joking,'€ Galan said. (fss)