Glen Malcolm Conning was shot dead after landing his helicopter in a remote village, 19 months after another pilot was taken captive.
Separatist fighters in Indonesia's far eastern Papua region have shot dead a New Zealand helicopter pilot, police say.
Rebels attacked the helicopter as soon as it landed Monday in Alama, a remote village in Mimika district of Central Papua province, said Faizal Ramadhani, who heads the joint peacekeeping and security force in Papua.
The attackers freed the four indigenous Papuan passengers who were on board the plane, operated by private aviation company Intan Angkasa Air Service.
“It has been confirmed that there was a hostage situation and a murder carried out by an armed criminal group,” Ramadhani said, identifying the pilot as Glen Malcolm Conning, 50.
The motive for the killing was not immediately clear. It came nearly 18 months after separatists kidnapped another New Zealand pilot, Phillip Mehrtens, who remains in captivity.
A spokesman for New Zealand's foreign ministry said it was aware of the report and that its embassy in Jakarta was seeking information from authorities, declining to comment further.
Conning was from Motueka in the north of New Zealand's South Island and an experienced pilot who had flown missions earlier this year to fight wildfires near Christchurch, The New Zealand Herald reported.
“[Glen] “He was much loved by the Motueka community and was a great family man,” close friend Kerry Gatenby told the newspaper.
A battle for independence has been raging for decades in Papua, a resource-rich region that is home to one of the world's largest gold and copper mines.
The conflict has escalated since 2018, when separatist fighters attacked a group working on a major road project, killing 19 Indonesian construction workers.
Mehrtens was captured in February 2023 after fighters from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPN-PB) ambushed a small commercial plane as it landed in the remote mountainous area of Nduga. They said they would release him only when Papua gained independence from Indonesia.
Police said TPN-PB was also behind Monday's attack. The group is the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and was designated a “terrorist” organisation by Indonesia in 2021.
TPN-PB spokesman Sebby Samborn told news agencies he had received no reports from the group's fighters about the killing.
“But if that happens, it is their fault for entering our forbidden territory,” Sambom was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency. “We have warned several times that this area is within our restricted zone, an armed conflict zone where any civilian aircraft are prohibited from landing.”
Papua, whose people are ethnically and culturally distinct from Indonesia, occupies the western half of the island of New Guinea, just 200 kilometres north of Australia, and shares a land border with Papua New Guinea (PNG).
The territory, a former Dutch colony, was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 after a controversial United Nations-backed referendum in which only about 1,000 Papuans were able to participate.
