Indonesian hypnotherapist unlocking minds of terrorists

Mardigu Wowiek Prasantyo's working day is filled with the bread and butter of any hypnotherapist: people quitting smoking, estranged couples, those attempting to lose weight or combat phobias. But, from time to time, the 45-year-old hypnotist has been asked to see an altogether different client, some of Indonesia's most hardened terrorists.

''The police found their techniques were not always effective,'' he says at his consulting rooms in South Jakarta. ''Sometimes they need a second or third opinion, other ways of interviewing.''

''You can use two techniques. Making people deeply relaxed, putting them in a trance. The other technique is what's called waking hypnosis,'' says the US-trained hypnotherapist.


It is the latter that Mr Mardigu deployed in interrogations and, like all hypnosis, it required the detainee to be congenial, if not a willing participant.

Mr Mardigu's advantage was that in the late 1990s he was a member of Jemaah Tabligh, a fundamentalist Islamic group that avows peaceful engagement but has seen terrorists pass through its ranks on their way to others with a violent credo.

''I knew some of these people before they became terrorists,'' says Mr Mardigu. ''I knew how to talk their language.''

Mr Mardigu interviewed Abu Dujana after his arrest in 2007. Abu Dujana was then head of Jemaah Islamiah, the terrorist group behind the Bali bombings, the attacks of the Marriott Hotel and Australian embassy.

Dressed in pious Islamic garb, Mr Mardigu mined Abu Dujana for ''emotional data'', patiently discussing jihad, his love of Islam, his mother and father.

''Once you break through, it's easy,'' says Mr Mardigu. ''He would simply tell you something when he remembered it … He told us everything. Where the weapons and ammunition was, their plans, the structure of the organisation and its membership.''

He stresses he always worked ''unofficially'' with other police and was one member of a team.

While sources have said Indonesian police use hypnosis techniques, the police declined to confirm the practice.

''The application of hypnotherapy is unofficial,'' said one senior anti-terrorism officer, who asked not to be identified. ''We only use it to get clues that will be used to get evidence or proof. It is the evidence that will be taken to court.''

Certainly, it is true that Abu Dujana spilled the beans to police. Mr Mardigu says he has since trained members of the Indonesian police and delivered seminars for the military.

He has not been without his critics, including Islamic clerics. When he set up his practice in 1991, he was widely denounced as a practitioner of black magic.

Accompanying doctors to Aceh following the 2004 tsunami to assist with pain management, Mr Mardigu ran into difficulties with religious leaders. ''They said what I was doing was heretical and I had to go.''

A Muslim, he later made a presentation on hypnotherapy to Indonesia's leading Islamic doctrine body, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia. ''The MUI declared it's not haram [forbidden] and it's not halal [permissible],'' he says. ''I guess it's in the middle, and that's fine by me.''