Kanjuruhan Stadium: The Tear-Gas Deployment, Crowd Crush, and Criminal Liability After the Match

On 1 October 2022, at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang Regency, East Java, the match ended before the emergency began. Arema FC had lost 3–2 to Persebaya Surabaya, and spectators moved into disorder inside the stadium. Police deployed tear gas. People attempted to reach exits as the crowd compressed around them, turning the space intended for departure into the site of a fatal crush. The football match had supplied the occasion; the security response and the movement of thousands through crowded passages determined what followed.

The away team was separated from the immediate danger by a different form of emergency response. Persebaya players were evacuated from the stadium in tactical vehicles after the unrest began. The vehicles carried them away from a ground that had ceased to function as a sporting venue, while spectators and stadium personnel faced the more difficult problem of finding routes through the disorder. The evacuation showed the speed with which officials recognized a security crisis. It also marked an unequal geography of escape: the players had transport, while many in the stands had only the exits before them.

The death toll expanded as the night gave way to the following day. The later consolidated figure was 135 dead and 583 injured. Early emergency reporting gave lower interim numbers—127 dead and 180 injured—as hospitals and authorities attempted to identify victims and count the wounded. The difference between those figures was not a change in the event itself but in the process of accounting for it. Each name, body, and injury altered the scale that officials and families had to confront.

On 2 October, RSUD Kanjuruhan in Kepanjen became one of the places where the disaster acquired individual faces and family histories. Emergency treatment was being provided inside the hospital, while relatives arrived seeking victims. The hospital was not the scene of the crush, but it became part of the same chain of consequence: the injured required care, the dead required identification, and families needed answers that the stadium could not provide. Outside, ambulances waited as the immediate response continued.

The police response moved quickly from emergency control to criminal investigation. On 6 October, Indonesian police announced six suspects in connection with the disaster: Ahmad Hadian Lukita, Abdul Haris, Suko Sutrisno, Wahyu Setyo Pranoto, Hasdarman, and Bambang Sidik Achmadi. The announcement placed individual officials and administrators inside a legal process only days after the deaths. It did not settle the full question of responsibility, but it established that the state would examine conduct through prosecution rather than treating the deaths solely as an unavoidable consequence of crowd disorder.

The central dispute was never limited to whether people had been crushed. That fact was visible in the casualties and in the hospital response. The harder question concerned how the crowd reached that condition: the use of tear gas, the panic and movement that followed, the pressure within the stands and exits, and the decisions made by those responsible for security. The surviving accounts did not reduce every death to one identical sequence. They placed police action and crowd compression within the same event, but the precise causal mechanism varied across the later examination.

A further examination came on 5 November 2022 at the cemetery of TPU Dusun Pathuk in Sukolilo village, Wajak, Malang Regency. An independent forensic team completed autopsies on the bodies of Natasya Debi Ramadani and Naila Debi Anggraini, two female victims whose graves were opened for the procedure. Their father, Devi Athok Yulfitri, spoke publicly about the examinations and about police contact and visits. The autopsies moved the inquiry beyond the first night’s estimates and witness accounts, placing two individual bodies at the center of a continuing forensic process.

By then, the case had acquired several clocks. Families were still carrying the consequences of the night; investigators were assigning roles; forensic doctors were examining the dead; and prosecutors were preparing a courtroom record. The six suspect announcements had made liability an official question, but suspicion and conviction remained different stages. The public could see the outline of the case before the courts had tested the conduct of each defendant. The victims’ number could be counted more readily than the responsibility behind each death.

The first trial over events related to Kanjuruhan was held in Surabaya on 16 January 2023. The proceedings transferred the disaster from stadium grounds and hospital corridors into the formal language of criminal adjudication. Defendants, prosecutors, and judges now had to address the conduct of police and stadium officials through charges and evidence rather than public declarations. The trial did not erase the disputed questions surrounding tear gas, compression, escape routes, or the timing of events. It gave those questions a legal venue and made the consequences of the night subject to judgment.

The legal process did not move in a straight line. Earlier acquittals of two police officers, Bambang Sidik Achmadi and Wahyu Setyo Pranoto, were later annulled by Indonesia’s Supreme Court. On 23 August 2023, the court imposed prison sentences on both men. That ruling did not create a single explanation for all 135 deaths, nor did it make every disputed fact disappear. It established a narrower institutional conclusion: two officers whose conduct had survived trial-level acquittal were held criminally liable at the country’s highest court.

Kanjuruhan therefore remained in the legal record as two connected events. The first was the stadium disaster itself: a football match followed by tear gas, a crowd crush, mass death, and injuries on a scale that emergency numbers initially understated. The second was the state’s effort to divide responsibility among police, stadium authorities, and other actors through suspects, autopsies, trials, appeals, and sentences. The court’s final intervention for two officers supplied an enduring judgment, while the exact pathway of every death remained contested across the proceedings.