Humble hero who saved Manny
Published: September 25, 2004
It’s the enduring image of the Jakarta embassy bombing. A man, his cheeks puffed out, cradles the broken body of a small girl, her pink sandals the only clothes left after she was caught in the terrorist attack.
Ahmad Usman, a 37-year-old air conditioning technician from a west Java village, is the unsung hero of the Jakarta bombing after he saved the life of five-year-old Elizabeth “Manny” Musu.
Manny lies in the intensive-care unit of a Singapore hospital fighting for her life only because of the courage of Ahmad, who picked her body out of the rubble and carried her to hospital.
Ahmad had been working around the corner from the embassy when the bomb exploded, killing nine people, including Manny’s mother, Maria Eva Kumulawati.
Emotion wells up in the softly spoken Ahmad, a devout Muslim, as he recalls the horrific scene that confronted him that morning.
When he picked up Manny’s body, Ahmad thought she was dead. It was only when they were in a car on the way to a hospital that he realised Manny had a chance.
“I was saying, ‘Oh my God, the girl is still alive,” Ahmad told The Sunday Telegraph.
“She was trembling and saying, ‘Mama, Mama.”‘
As they drove to the hospital, Ahmad looked down at Manny’s face and began to cry, remembering his own baby daughter who had died of a brain inflammation four months earlier.
“It made me sad because it reminded me of my daughter who died,” he said. When The Sunday Telegraph found Ahmad, he was back at work near the embassy, building air-conditioning ducts.
He was wearing the same black woollen beanie, with its distinctive gold writing, that he wore that terrible day.
When the bomb exploded, Ahmad’s building shook. Instinctively, he ran out to the street and towards the blast site.
People were running everywhere, blood streaming, but Ahmad’s eyes were drawn to an injured embassy security guard, Syahromi, who was trying to help a little girl. That girl was Manny.
Ahmad didn’t see Manny’s mother lying nearby. She had been killed instantly. At first, he thought Manny was dead.
Her body was limp, her eyes had rolled back and she was bleeding profusely from her head. Ahmad thought his efforts were in vain.
But he persisted, running with Manny in his arms until a car stopped, its driver beckoning him to get in. He realised Manny was still alive when she began to tremble and her eyes blinked.
After placing Manny on a stretcher in the chaos of the MMC Hospital, Ahmad ran back to help more people.
But when he got there, the extent of the carnage sank in. He saw body parts flung up and down the street and was physically sick.
Ahmad had to get away. After returning to work, he went to his parents’ Jakarta home, where he stays during the week.
Ahmad initially heard the little girl had died and was unable to sleep that night. But his face lit up when he recalled learning that Manny was still clinging to life.
“I felt so happy. Oh my God, she is alive!” he said.
At Cigeruk, a village in western Java, Ahmad’s wife, Kokomon Komariah, 25, worried for her husband’s safety. At home with their children - son Rido, six, and daughter Dide, four - she had no way of contacting her husband.
She knew Ahmad worked near the Australian embassy, but the family live modestly. They cook on an open fire and have no telephone.
Ahmad couldn’t call to say he was safe, and he didn’t return from Jakarta until several days later.
The image of Ahmad carrying Manny’s body filled newspaper front pages, but Kokomon didn’t see them until a teacher brought a newspaper to her the next day.
That Sunday night, when her husband tiptoed into the house, it was an emotional homecoming.
Kokomon flung her arms around him and kissed his face. Ahmad says he just wanted to look at the faces of his sleeping children.
“I came into the house and my daughter was sleeping,” he said. “I just stopped and looked at my son and daughter sleeping. I fixed up the bedclothes around them and thought about the little girl.”
Ahmad is a hero in the eyes of his children and fellow villagers. But he’s a gentle, humble family man who wants no part of the limelight.
To him, his actions at the scene weren’t extraordinary - he just did what God wanted of him. But locals now call him “pahlawan” - Indonesian for hero.
Everyone in the picturesque village, up in the mountains with a river running through it, has a copy of newspapers and magazines with Ahmad’s picture.
They all want to shake his hand and congratulate him.
Ahmad is comfortable with this, but he’s less at ease in Jakarta, where strangers gather every time he goes out to buy a drink.
Dide is too young to understand, but to Rido his dad is a hero.
When magazines with Ahmad’s picture came out, Rido proudly showed them to his friends, saying: “This is my father.”
Kokomon says, simply: “I was really, really proud of him that he tried to help the little girl.
“He told me that when he was helping the girl, it felt like he was helping his own daughter.”
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