Justice has not been served in the death of Indonesian maid Adelina Sau, said her family who were shocked to learn that Adelina’s Malaysian employer was recently acquitted of the murder.

In February last year, 21-year-old Adelina died in hospital in Malaysia after succumbing to wounds allegedly inflicted by her employer. Local rights advocates alerted the authorities to her situation after neighbors found her battered and bitten and forced to sleep outside of her employer’s home in Bukit Mertajam, Penang with her employer’s pet Rottweiler for more than a month.

Her employer, S. Ambika, was charged with murder, which carries a mandatory death sentence in Malaysia, but last Thursday she was acquitted by the Penang High Court.

The acquittal came as a disappointment to Adelina’s family in her hometown in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), with her mother, Yohana Banunaek, saying that Adelina deserved justice.

“She did not die from illness, she was tortured. But why can her killer now walk free?” Yohana said on Tuesday. “We don’t want her murderer to be free, she [the employer] must be punished severely.”

Paul Sinlaeloe of NTT-based labor advocacy group PIAR said there was “no justice for migrant workers from Indonesia” and therefore the Indonesian government “must urge the Malaysian government to have the perpetrators legally processed”.

The Indonesian government, meanwhile, appeared to have been caught off guard over the ruling.

“We are very shocked because we know there are sufficient witnesses and evidence against the defendant,” said Iwanshah Wibisono, the consul general of Indonesia in Penang.

The Indonesian government is not party to the current legal process, but hopes the prosecutors move to appeal the court ruling.

Migrant CARE executive director Wahyu Susilo criticized Indonesian representatives in Penang, as well as the public, for being “complacent and not paying much attention to the court proceedings”.

Iwanshah brushed off the suggestion that they were complacent, saying that the recent Indonesian presidential and legislative elections had kept them busy and eventually shifted their attention.

“The court hearing was on April 18, and the day before was election day — an event that we might have focused more on. But that does not mean we were complacent,” Iwanshah said.

It was reported that the High Court granted the employer a full acquittal on the murder charge after the prosecutors requested a discharge not amounting to an acquittal, according to Malaysian news outlet The Star.

The acquittal also shocked Malaysian rights groups and Steven Sim, a Bukit Mertajam lawmaker involved in rescuing Adelina who recently sought clarification from the Malaysian attorney general.

The Star reported that the attorney general had promised Sim he would “investigate and look into the next course of action”.

A petition on change.org initiated by Kuala Lumpur-based rights group Tenaganita on Sunday had garnered more than 16,000 signatures from Malaysia, as well as Indonesia, as of Wednesday.

Adelina’s case had attracted public scrutiny and sparked diplomatic tensions between the neighbors, with Jakarta threatening to stop sending Indonesian domestic workers to Malaysia last year.

The case also sparked concern about the renewal of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Indonesia and Malaysia on the protection of migrant workers, which expired in 2016. The Manpower Ministry, the leading sector on the agreement, has so far failed to seal a deal with Malaysia.

“Opportunities do not come only once. And maybe this public reaction to Adelina’s case could provide new momentum [to ensure the protection of migrant workers through the MoU renewal],” Avyanthi Azis, a global migration expert at the University of Indonesia, said. “But it depends on how much effort we put into seizing the opportunity.”

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