A Muslim police general named Napoleon Bonaparte serving time for corruption could face another five years in jail after he assaulted a blasphemer of the Prophet Muhammad with his faeces.
The inmate, who is named Napoleon Bonaparte after the French military general, was given a four-year prison sentence in March for receiving a bribe.
He is serving his sentence at the National Police’s Crime Investigation Agency holding facility in the administrative city of East Jakarta in Indonesia, which is where the alleged attack took place.
The victim of the attack was Muhammad Kace, an avowed religious scholar, who had been taken into custody after he was accused of insulting the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Blasphemy is a crime in Indonesia, where it carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
A high-profile blasphemy case saw then-Jakarta-governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who is a Christian, sentenced to two years in prison in May 2017 after he was convicted of the crime following a speech in which he referred to a verse in the Quran.
Bonaparte and four fellow inmates, reportedly comprising of some hardline Islamists, are alleged to have taken part in an attack on Kace, with Bonaparte alone assaulting him on another occasion.
On one of the two occasions, Bonaparte is believed to have smeared his faeces on Kace, leading to the police general being charged with assault.
If he is found guilty, he could face another five and a half years in prison on top of his current sentence.
The four other inmates have been charged with the same crime, and the police have identified a corrections officer as a suspected accomplice, as he is believed to have given the alleged attackers access to Kace’s cell, reportedly on Bonaparte’s request.
According to the police, Bonaparte has contradicted himself, denying the assault during questioning but also issuing a statement in which he insinuated he was proud of having punished an alleged blasphemer of Islam.
Before he was sent to prison, Bonaparte headed the National Police’s Internal Relations Division.
His downfall came when he accepted a bribe of billions of Indonesian rupiah (IDR 1 billion = GBP 51,945) from corruption fugitive Djoko Tjandra to take his name off Interpol’s red notice list.
Kace is accused of several counts of blasphemy and disinformation and faces a maximum six-year prison sentence if found guilty.
In a viral YouTube video, he caused a stir by suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a disciple of ‘jinn’, supernatural creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology.
