• Golfrid Siregar was a fierce opponent of the controversial hydroelectric power plant being built deep in the Sumatran Batang Toru rainforest.
• Environmental activists claim the project, which many see as unnecessary, endangers the habitat of the unique Tapanuli orangutan

In Indonesia, environmental activism can be a risky business. Golfrid Siregar knew that. His wife, Resmi Barimbing, knew it, too. Last year, Siregar would tell Barimbing it was no longer safe in the port city of Medan, where since 2016 he had worked as a lawyer for the largest environmental organisation in the Southeast Asian archipelago.

“Don’t go too far from home,” she recalls him warning her one day last autumn, not long before Siregar was found lying unconscious, gravely injured beside his motorcycle on the side of the road. Three strangers loaded him into a pedicab and took him to the Mitra Sejati Hospital, but Siregar never woke up, and three days later, on October 6, he died.