Jakarta, Indonesia July 11: An Australian working for mining giant Freeport in Indonesia’s restive Papua was shot and killed at dawn Saturday, possibly by a sniper, police and company officials said.
It was the latest incident at the Grasberg site, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, where two Americans were killed in an ambush in 2002.
Papua, a desperately poor and militarized province on Indonesia’s easternmost tip, is home to separatist rebels who denounce PT Freeport as a symbol of Jakarta’s rule.
“A shot was fired and a bullet struck a … vehicle, fatally wounding one employee riding in the back seat,” said a statement from the subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. to The Associated Press. “Other passengers were not injured.”
Papua police chief Bagus Ekodanto said the victim was a 29-year-old Australian technical expert. Freeport did not identify the person killed.
“Most likely it was carried out by a sniper,” said national police spokeswoman Nanan Sukarna, noting that four other passengers, three of them foreigners, were unhurt. The bullet was fired from distant hills, she said.
The victim was taken to a hospital in Kuala Kencana, a local mining town, where he died, she said.
No suspects were detained, but several witnesses had been questioned, Sukarna said.
A company employee _ who was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity _ said earlier it was an American mechanical engineer who was traveling with his family.
The Indonesian government does not allow foreign media to freely report in Papua, where it has tens of thousands of troops. The site of Saturday’s shooting was inaccessible to local reporters.
The Grasberg mining complex is one of the world’s largest single producers of copper and gold, the company says on its Web site. Open-pit mining at the site began in 1990 and is expected to continue until mid-2015.
The mining operation has been a continuous source of friction with local Papuans angered over the outflow of profit to foreign investors, while they remain poor. Freeport has extracted billions of dollars in gold from the mine.
Security was raised around the mine Saturday and anti-terrorism police were investigating, but mining activities were not disrupted, said company spokesman Mindo Pangaribuan.
In 2002, two American schoolteachers were killed when their car came under fire at Freeport’s facility in an attack initially blamed on Indonesian soldiers. Details of the incident remain mysterious.
–Agencies