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Riau Police name palm oil company executives suspects of forest fires
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This picture taken on Sept. 23 shows Indonesian firefighters battling a peatland forest fire in Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra. The blazes have been spewing toxic haze across Southeast Asia, forcing the closure of schools and airports, and prompting Jakarta to deploy thousands of personnel to tackle them. (AFP/Abdul Qodir)
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he Riau Police named executives of palm oil company PT Sumber Sawit Sejahtera as suspects of forest fires in Pelalawan regency, Riau, on Wednesday.
The suspects, identified only as EDH and AOH, were the company’s president director and operations manager respectively. The police named them suspects after collecting evidence that showed their involvement in the Pelalawan forest fires.
Previously, the Riau Police named PT Sumber Sawit Sejahtera a suspect for allegedly being responsible for the fires.
The forest fires were first detected in February and burned 155.2 hectares of oil palm field and forest within a month. Riau Police crime unit head AKBP Andri Sudarmadi said the police’s findings indicated that the company had neglected the fire and failed to anticipate it.
“[The evidence] showed that the company didn't do anything to extinguish the fire. Even if they did, we suspected that they only did that to prevent the fire from burning another field,” he said, adding that another piece of evidence that backed up the police’s assumptions was the finding of canals around the location to prevent the fire from spreading.
Sudarmadi stated that one of the expert witnesses also found palm oil seeds in the burnt field around the company’s area.
“The seeds were planted out of order. Moreover, they also found a stock of palm oil seeds that we assumed would be planted after the forest was cleared, which violated Agriculture Ministerial Regulation No. 5/2018,” he said.
