After being locked up for 7.5 years, former antigraft czar Antasari Azhar is now a free man.

Declared guilty by the Tangerang District Court in 2009, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison in a controversial, high-profile murder case involving a businessman and his alleged love affair with a female caddy.

After going through all legal options to challenge the verdict that put an end of his stellar career in the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Antasari was granted clemency by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo on Monday. The clemency commuted the remaining six years of his sentence after the Law and Human Rights Ministry granted him parole after serving two thirds of his sentence as he also received a total 4.5 years of sentence cuts from the ministry.

As a free man, he came to the State Palace on Thursday afternoon to meet with the man who had granted him his freedom.

“I came here to thank [the President] for granting me clemency. I proposed a meeting with him a long time ago, but it was only approved now,” he told reporters.

Visiting the State Palace by himself, Antasari went straight to the Presidential Office for his private meeting with Jokowi at around 3.30 p.m.

More than an hour later, he was met by a swarm of journalists on his way out, who fired a barrage of questions at him.

“Psstt. Why do you really want to know?” he said while holding his index finger to his mouth and refusing to give details on the meeting, before quickly entering his car and leaving.

Presidential spokesman Johan Budi confirmed that Antasari had filed his request for the meeting through State Secretary Pratikno. While not giving details on when the meeting request was filed, Johan said Jokowi only had the time to meet Antasari on Thursday.

When asked about what the two men had discussed, Johan said he did not know as he was not present during their talk.

Jokowi’s decision to meet with the man convicted of murder during the tenure of his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has been met with surprise.

During his career in the KPK, the former prosecutor sent several prominent figures to prison. Under his leadership, the KPK prosecuted Aulia Pohan, a former high-ranking central bank official, for graft in 2009. Aulia is the father-in-law of Yudhoyono’s eldest son Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, who is now running in the Jakarta gubernatorial election.

In the murder case, Antasari was declared guilty for initiating the murder of businessman Nasrudin Zulkarnaen, whose wife Rani Juliani was also at the center of the case.

Antasari’s lawyer, Boyamin Saiman, refused to give details on the meeting as per Antasari’s request.

“I was told to say that the meeting was to express gratitude [to the President],” he said, adding that his legal team is preparing a review of his client’s verdict, which he claimed was supported by new evidence.

Antasari filed his first clemency request to Jokowi in 2014 but was left disappointed after the State Palace rejected his proposal because the law on clemency stipulates that a convict can only file a clemency request within a year of their case ruling having been deemed legal and binding. Antasari made the proposal more than two years after the Supreme Court’s final ruling. He then filed a challenge to the law at the Constitutional Court, asking the court to scrap the time limit for clemency requests.

The court sided with Antasari and declared that convicts could file clemency requests at any time, a move that inspired him to file a second clemency request in September, one month before he was released on parole.

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