Consulate Caper

New York Times
January 30, 2006
Man's Body Found in Room at the Indonesian Consulate
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and MARC SANTORA
An Indonesian man stranded in New York for the weekend pending a flight home was found dead yesterday, a knife protruding from his chest and one hand nearly severed at the wrist, in a blood-spattered basement room of the Indonesian Consulate on the Upper East Side, the police said.
The consulate, an elegant 19th-century Beaux-Arts mansion off Fifth Avenue that is Indonesia's home in New York for cultural events, cocktail receptions, economic conferences and aid to travelers, was transformed on a quiet Sunday morning into the setting of a locked-door mystery. It appeared to be a homicide, investigators said, though they did not rule out suicide.
If it was suicide, the victim — Bambang Wielianto, 35, of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital — would have had to plunge a butcher knife into his chest before or after cutting his left wrist so deeply that his hand was almost severed. At least three knives, including the one in his chest, were found in the room, but no note, the police said.
But if it was murder, the motive was murky and the case swirled with Agatha Christie shadows. Mr. Wielianto, who had been put up at the consulate on Friday, was last seen on Saturday when he told a consulate employee that he was homesick and eager to get back to his wife and two children. He had been alone overnight in the four-story mansion, at 5 East 68th Street, except for a security guard and a visiting Indonesian diplomat.
Investigators and employees said the diplomat, who was not identified by the authorities, stayed in a top-floor suite Saturday night and flew back yesterday to Los Angeles, where he works. And the security guard, who found the body and called the police just after 9 a.m., was said to have been posted all night at a desk just inside the consulate's locked basement door, about 25 feet from the room where the victim died.
The virtually severed hand appeared to be a tantalizing clue. A hard-line Muslim group, the Majelis Mujahedeen Indonesia, began a campaign in Jakarta last month to demand the enforcement of the hudud, the harsh criminal code in the Muslim law called Shariah, which prescribes punishments like the amputation of hands for theft and stoning for adultery.
There were no signs of a break-in, investigators said. And under strict procedures of the security-conscious consulate — rules sharpened by terrorist attacks in Bali and other parts of the Indonesian archipelago in recent years — a visitor would have had to phone the guard and ask permission to enter the locked basement door, the only door used overnight.
The security guard, identified by fellow employees only as Adi, was one of many consulate workers and officials interviewed by the police yesterday. But there was no immediate word from investigators about what the guard saw or heard Saturday night and yesterday morning — specifically whether anyone was allowed in or went out — and the circumstances surrounding his discovery of the body.
The investigation transformed the consulate into a movielike crime scene yesterday, with detectives and Indonesian and State Department officials scurrying in and out, access to the block cut off for hours and stunned employees and members of a regular Sunday dance class turned away by officers and yellow tape. Because the consulate is sovereign Indonesian territory, the police were there by invitation.
Jay Suherwanco, on his way to a traditional Balinese dance class at the consulate, was amazed when told that there was a body inside. So was Nyoman Sapta, 42, director of the Gamelan Dharma Swara dance company, which meets there every Sunday for classes. "No one knew him," Mr. Sapta said of the dead man. "On Friday, people were like, 'Who's this guy?' and today he's dead."
Residents of the block were less sanguine. "I thought they were filming for an episode of 'Law and Order,' " Michelle Brilliant, who lives next door, said as she emerged with her daughter, Aza Hougie, 3, carrying a Snow White umbrella into the light drizzle of an overcast day.
Little was known of Mr. Wielianto. Acup Setia, 45, who has been the consulate chauffeur for 20 years, said that he saw the victim's passport when the man arrived on Friday seeking accommodations, and that a fellow consulate employee had spoken to the visitor and learned that he had a wife and two children in Jakarta and had arrived in the United States on a tourist visa on Dec. 13.
It was unclear where Mr. Wielianto had spent the intervening time, but he told the consular worker that he had come to New York from Philadelphia on Friday and needed a room for a couple of days until his departure for home. He said he had a confirmed seat on a Japan Air Lines flight leaving Wednesday, but was wait-listed for a flight departing as early as yesterday.
While it is rare for Indonesian nationals to seek accommodations at the consulate, it happens two or three times a year and is not regarded as extraordinary, consular employees said. Diplomats and dignitaries are given suites on the consulate's upper floors, while the occasional traveler in need is given a room in the basement, they said.
The room Mr. Wielianto was given is normally used to store the musical instruments of the Gamelan Dharma Swara company, mostly drums, gongs, brasses and other percussion pieces, according to Mr. Sapta, who said he himself moved the instruments out on Friday so that a bed for Mr. Wielianto could be moved in.
To reach the room, one enters the basement from the sidewalk down a flight of steps to the right of the portico at the main entrance. Just inside the locked basement door is a large foyer, with the security guard's desk on the right and a reception area with seating for guests on the left. Straight ahead, at the back of the foyer, is a door leading to a hallway.
Down that hallway, at the far end, is the consulate kitchen, where, one investigator said, the knives may have come from. On the left side of the hallway, between foyer and kitchen, a door leads into the room given to Mr. Wielianto. Among many unanswered questions in the case is what Mr. Wielianto did after getting the room — whether he went out Saturday or met anyone in or outside the consulate.
His body, the police said, was found on the floor of his room, shirtless and face up, the long knife protruding from his chest and his nearly severed left hand dangling loose. At least two other knives were found near the body, and blood streaked and spattered the room. It was unclear if the door had a lock.
Signs of normalcy began returning to the consulate late in the day as a long-scheduled reception began upstairs even as detectives worked around the body in the basement. At 5:45 p.m., as guests in evening dress flowed up the portico into a reception given by the Council of Senior Centers and Services to benefit the New York City Conference on Aging, men carried the body out in a bag. An autopsy was set for today, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner.
A curious feature of the consulate, a 50-foot-wide gray stone manse with bay windows that was built in 1894 by the Boston firm of Peabody & Stearns as a residence for the real estate investor John Emery, is that it is a mirror-image, back-to-back twin of a town house at 8 East 69th Street, built by the same firm in 1892 for Charles S. Colby, the railroad magnate who endowed Colby College in Waterville, Me. There is no known passage between the two structures.
Kate Hammer contributed reporting for this article.