BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — For the first time in Indonesia's landmark human rights trial in Aceh, soldiers admitted Tuesday that they had executed civilians but said they are not guilty of murder charges because they were only following the orders of their commander.
The 13 soldiers testified one after the other that 26 students who had been injured in a military raid on their Islamic boarding school in Aceh last July were then taken into the countryside and shot to death.
In another development Tuesday, five people were killed in Aceh in the latest round of fighting, three days before Indonesian officials and rebel leaders are scheduled to meet in Geneva for peace talks that could lead to a cease-fire in the 25-year-old separatist insurgency.
The unprecedented human rights trial in Aceh was launched in April by Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid as a way of reaching out to the separatist forces in the province in northwestern Indonesia.
The rebels are fighting for independence, a greater share of the profits from the oil-rich region and the right to impose Islamic religious laws on the people.
Tuesday, the soldiers who said they carried out the executions said they were only following orders.
One defendant, Lt. Trijoko Adiwiyono, said he questioned the order to shoot the injured students but was slapped by his commander, Lt. Col. Sudjono, and was forced to carry out the order.
Sudjono later disappeared and remains at large.
"He might have shot me if I had rejected his order," Adiwiyono testified in the heavily fortified courtroom.
The executions followed the deaths of another 30 students and a teacher who were fatally shot by the military during the same anti-guerrilla sweep in Aceh.
The 11 soldiers and a civilian accused of being responsible for those deaths testified Monday that they had shot in self-defense.
The prosecution is seeking murder convictions and the death penalty in the case against the 24 military and one civilian defendants.
Since coming to office in October, Wahid has been reducing the tremendous power that the military enjoyed under President Suharto, the authoritarian leader who was driven out of power in May 1998 by widespread pro-democracy protests and riots. During Suharto's 32-year regime, police and soldiers were often accused of killing civilians, especially in areas where insurgencies were under way, such as Aceh and East Timor.
In the killings that occurred in Aceh on Monday, Lt. Col. Syafei Aksal, a local police chief, said three rebels were fatally shot in a gunbattle with security forces that also wounded seven soldiers in north Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province.
But a rebel spokesman, Teungku Ismail Syahputra, said the three people killed were civilians.
Also on Monday, a civilian was killed by unidentified gunmen on the outskirts of the region's capital, Banda Aceh.
, said the area's police spokesman, Lt. Col. Sayed Huseini. An Indonesian Red Cross volunteer, Ridwan, said another civilian was found dead in the capital. Ridwan, like many Indonesian's only uses one name.
The killings brought this year's death toll in Aceh to 345.