Muhammad Indera — popularly known as Mat Indera — was executed on this date in 1953 in British-controlled Malaysia.
The imam turned Communist insurgent directed one of the signal bloodbaths of the Malayan Emergency — the tumultuous decade of political and guerrilla struggle against the British Empire for sovereignty.
Mat Indera’s contribution was the 1950 Bukit Kepong incident — an armed attack on a police station in that town that killed 19 policemen.
The 1981 movie Bukit Kepong dramatizes the events in question.
The British put a handsome price on the man’s head, and in 1952 someone took it.
His name and his deed are still controversial enough in Malaysia that a politician in 2011 found himself upon a sticky wicket for suggesting that Mat Indera was an anti-imperial hero.
On this day..
- 1945: Andrew Brown, Leading Aircraftsman
- 1937: Georgy Pyatakov, Anti-Soviet Parallel Trotskyist
- 1944: The Homfreyganj massacre of the Andaman Islands
- 1744: Skinnar Per Andersson, legislator
- 1801: Four entrapped Jacobins
- 1857: Jean-Louis Verger, doctrinaire
- 1913: John Williams, the Case of the Hooded Man
- 2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric
- 1474: Not the Archer of Meudon
- 1996: William Flamer, Alito'd
- 1661: Oliver Cromwell, posthumously
- 1649: Charles I