Jakarta: Indonesian police will sue a news
magazine over a story on corruption because the cover depicted
an officer with piggy banks, and pigs are considered dirty in
Islam, the police chief said on Thursday.
The threat of legal action against the publishers of
Tempo magazine, a respected Indonesian and English-language
weekly, came days after it ran an in-depth feature on alleged
police graft and embezzlement.
National police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri did not
respond to the corruption allegations but said officers had
been "hurt" and angered by the report, particularly the piggy
banks on the cover.
He claimed that the magazine had depicted police as pigs,
when in fact the cover shows a graphic of a uniformed officer
with three piggy banks on leashes made of yellow crime-scene
tape.
"The fact that we are illustrated as pigs hurts us a
lot," Danuri told reporters after attending a service to mark
the 64th anniversary of the establishment of the mainly
Muslim country's police force.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, July 01, 2010, 21:14