Bali cop bashing: Sara Connor and David Taylor embrace the reality of fatal attack’s aftermath
FOR three hours, Sara Connor and David Taylor were the star actors in a police drama played out on the beach, as the media and tourists watched.
SARA Connor and David Taylor embraced tenderly. She nestled her head into his shoulder, Taylor kissed her forehead.
Then the couple re-enacted, in graphic detail, how Bali police officer Wayan Sudarsa was brutally bashed to death on a Kuta beach.
At one stage Connor straddled a prone officer, who was playing the role of Sudarsa, acting out hitting him about the head with his own walkie talkie.
And Taylor, laying on the sand with the officer on top of him, re-enacted bashing the officer with a broken Bintang beer bottle.
For three hours, from 4am yesterday, Connor and Taylor were the star actors in an Indonesian police drama played out on the beach, as the media, tourists and onlookers watched from the sidelines.
Multiple times the lovers embraced and kissed, just as they had done on the night of the attack. Police later insisted the kissing was spontaneous and not part of the script. Their every move was filmed and photographed.
NIGHTMARE REINACTED
It was the first time that Connor, a 45-year-old mum of two from Byron Bay and her British boyfriend, Taylor, 33, had seen each and been allowed together since their detention as murder suspects 14 days ago.
Connor, looking drawn and bewildered, leaned into Taylor as the couple was brought from separate police cars to the beach gate where the drama had its genesis. One of their lawyers asked that their handcuffs be removed to allow the re-enactment to proceed more smoothly.
As surreal as it seemed, crime reconstructions are a routine part of police investigations in Indonesia, where suspects are asked to play out the role of themselves.
A police officer played the role of his dead colleague and translators flanked the pair. Cardboard arrows and scene numbers were held up as an officer called the shots on a loud hailer. Scene 31 was the death scene.
Police claimed later that differences in the versions of events given by Connor and Taylor had emerged during the reconstruction and that the couple will now be asked to confront each other.
After the reconstruction, Denpasar police general crime unit chief, Reinhard Habonaran Nainggolan, claimed that four scenes on Kuta beach showed Connor’s involvement in Sudarsa’s death.
Connor and her lawyers have denied she played any role in the murder and that she was trying to separate her boyfriend and the victim, not kill him.
WALKIE TALKIE CONTENTION
Mr Nainggolan said it was alleged that Connor hit the officer using her hand and using the officer’s own walkie talkie. He said, based on Connor’s confession to police, she had hit the officer with the heavy object.
So at one stage in dramatic scenes, Connor re-enacted wielding the walkie talkie and aiming at the officer’s head as she sat on top of him. The officer turned his head and acted out biting the Australian woman on the thigh.
Asked if Connor admitted hitting the victim using her hand and the walkie talkie, Mr Nainggolan said: “Yes, until the victim bit her. As the bite looked deep it means she was quite strong (in hitting the victim).”
But Connor’s lawyer Erwin Siregar said this was not true and that she was not hitting the victim with the walkie talkie but throwing it away.
Mr Siregar said many parts of the reconstruction were unknown and foreign to Connor, who maintains that she played no role in the officer’s alleged murder, but tried to separate a fight between her boyfriend and the officer.
“At that time, indeed Sara took that (walkie) talkie but she disposed of it, not using it to hit the victim and that is clear in this re-enactment,” Mr Siregar said. “Sara did not hit the victim.”
He said that after separating the victim and her boyfriend, Connor had left to continue looking for her lost handbag.
It is not clear why Connor was seen hitting the officer with the walkie talkie in the re-enactment.
Mr Siregar said that he had told his client to tell the truth.
EXTENSIVE RECONSTRUCTION
Mr Nainggolan said that a total of 68 scenes were re-enacted — 51 on Kuta beach where the officer died, 13 at the Kubu Kauh Beach Inn, where the couple stayed the that night of the murder and four at a location in Jimbaran where the couple allegedly burned the bloody clothes they were wearing.
A re-enactment at a homestay in Jimbaran, where the couple holed up after the alleged murder, was not done on site because it was too close to the home of the victim. Instead these scenes were done at the police station.
And police revealed that yesterday, during the reconstruction, they had found the police officer’s broken mobile phone in bushland about five metres from the place where the bloody clothes were burned.
Mr Nainggolan was asked about the intimacy between the couple throughout the beach scenes and whether they had been asked to show how they had kissed and cuddled.
“Of course not, that’s spontaneous from them,” he said.
Taylor’s lawyer Haposan Sihombing said Taylor had told him some parts of the re-enactment were not correct.
The couple will now be brought together to go through and “confront” the differences that have emerged in their statements and from the reconstruction.
As they parted yesterday, after six hours of re-enactments, police applauded and the couple kissed one last time before being taken to separate jail cells.
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