The Petrus killings (portmanteau of Penembakan Misterius) were a series of extrajudicial executions in Indonesia that occurred between 1983 and 1985 under President Suharto's New Order regime.
Without undergoing a trial, thousands of criminals and other offenders (including alleged political dissents) were killed by undercover Indonesian Army death squads and secret police forces.
The term Petrus is derived from the Indonesian backronym containing the words penembak misterius (mysterious shooter), referring the undercover and anonymous nature of the death squads.
[1] The killings are cited as a prominent trait of the New Order's authoritarian rule, and was once likened to the 1972 martial law in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos.
Commander of Indonesia's Armed Forces, General Leonardus Benjamin Moerdani initially blamed the killings on gang wars.
[4] The operation was planned in March 1983 by the Yogyakarta garrison commander Lt. Col. Mochamad Hasbi and later spread; some criminals surrendered, some were shot, some fled and others quit crime.
Police intelligence supplied the garrison commander with a list naming hundreds of suspected criminals and ex-prisoners in the region.
Those who did, and these numbered several hundred, were required to fill out detailed forms, providing their life history as well as data on all their family members and friends.
[5] Suharto himself did not acknowledge the killings and the military's responsibility until his biography, Pikiran, Ucapan, dan Tindakan Saya (My Thoughts, Words, and Deeds) was published in 1988.
In 1984, Hans van den Broek, the former Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, asked the Indonesian government to place the death toll around 3,000.