Indonesia’s poisoned-satay killing has echoes of Jessica Wongso’s 2016 cyanide-coffee murder case

A delivery driver’s 10-year-old son died after eating the poisoned satay sauce that was in a package his father had tried and failed to deliver

Police say the intended recipient was a 25-year-old woman’s former partner – sparking comparisons with a similar poisoning case in 2016

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A suspect, identified as ‘NA’, caused a boy’s death after he ate poisoned satay meant for her ex-lover. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:00am, 17 May 2021Updated: 4:07pm, 24 May 2021

Indonesia has been gripped by the lurid details of a poisoning case that bears similarities to the trial of Jessica Wongso in 2016 and which has reignited discussions of how and why women kill.

While Wongso was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing her friend Wayan Mirna Salihin after poisoning her coffee with cyanide, the new case features spiked satay which was allegedly sent by a 25-year-old suspect, identified as “NA”, to her former partner “Tomy”, a police officer in the city of Yogyakarta.

Local police believe NA approached a delivery driver named Bandiman on April 25 while he was at a mosque and asked him to deliver the satay to Tomy – initially hampering efforts to trace the origins of the order for lack of an online paper trail.

Police say the intended recipient of the poisoned satay was a fellow officer in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Handout

When Bandiman tried to deliver the poisoned satay, however, Tomy was not at home and his wife refused to accept the package as she did not recognise the sender.

The driver then took the satay home with him and ate it with his wife and 10-year-old son, Naba, who both became ill after dipping the meat in the accompanying peanut sauce that was laced with rat poison.