A woman who was mistaken for a kidnapper and burned to death in a vigilante killing.
A series of videos depicting the tragic fate of a 50-year-old woman in Sorong, West Papua, Indonesia, on January 24, 2023. She lost her life in a vigilante killing—a case of mistaken identity—after being suspected because she “resembled a kidnapper” in a photo posted on social media; she was surrounded by a mob, lynched, doused in gasoline, and burned alive.
What is most shocking of all is the fact that the kidnapping incident that sparked the suspicion never actually happened. I mean, surely things don’t usually turn out like that.
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The practice of “taking the law into one’s own hands” and recurring cases of mistaken vigilante justice.
The backdrop to such acts of vigilantism in Indonesia is a practice known as main hakim sendiri—literally “taking the law into one’s own hands”—which became widespread following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998. Distrust in the corrupt judicial and police systems is cited as a primary cause; between 1999 and 2002, over 300 incidents of mob violence were recorded in the Jakarta metropolitan area alone. Notably, the method of punishing suspects by setting them on fire gained traction after 1999; one study found that 18 of the 48 mob-related fatalities during that period involved victims being burned to death.
In early 2023, rumors regarding kidnappings spread rapidly across various regions via social media, a phenomenon fueled by low digital literacy and public distrust of the authorities. On February 3, a man distributing candy in Surabaya was beaten to death after being mistaken for a kidnapper, and on February 23, a riot sparked by kidnapping allegations in Wamena, Papua, resulted in 12 deaths. A similar incident occurred in 2017 in West Kalimantan, where a 53-year-old man—who was merely searching for his grandchild—was beaten to death due to a similar rumor. Although the locations and years differ, the common thread is a pattern in which a crowd takes action before verifying the facts.
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