Prabowo sacks his chief of staff, and 20,000 soldiers appear in Jakarta

President Prabowo Subianto dismissed his own chief of staff on Wednesday, one day after police announced they had arrested him. Al Jazeera reports that Listyo Sigit Prabowo, who ran the national police for five years and only moved into the presidential office last month, is accused of tapping the phones of senior figures, including the president and cabinet ministers. Two other serving officers are accused of helping him, among them Ahrie Sonta Nasution, who heads the police legal division. The taps allegedly ran from last year into this year, while the suspect was still the country's police chief.

The language coming out of the palace is heavy. Presidential spokesperson Prasetyo Hadi said the alleged spying "may already fall into a category that can be considered an act tending towards treason", meaning a crime against the state itself, and said it put the president's safety at risk. Asep Safrudin, the top detective in the national police, said the operation was run "without any legal basis", with none of the approval steps the law requires. Yet the senior minister for legal affairs, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, says the motive has still not been determined. Police also say the suspects ordered the intercepted files deleted last month to hide what they had done.

On the same day, the military put more than 20,000 soldiers on the streets of Jakarta. A deployment that size, on the day a spying case reached the president's own office, is hard to read as routine. The armed forces would not say whether the two were connected, and their spokesperson, Major-General Muhammad Nas, said "troop deployments are a normal occurrence."

Why it matters

If you work in politics, the media, or civil society, the question has moved on from whose phone was tapped to who the soldiers are there for. The palace is treating this as something close to an attack on the state while its own law minister says nobody yet knows why it happened, and those two positions cannot both hold for long. Watch whether prosecutors name a motive, and whether the troops leave the streets once they do.