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The account of Zulfiadi’s last day was given by five village men who witnessed the events of Thursday, March 24. Zulfiadi, it transpired, had signed his own death warrant with a boast.

The UN tents stand near the ruins of a paramilitary police post whose occupants died when the wave rushed in on December 26. Zulfiadi, fatally, had bragged to his friends of finding two of their weapons somewhere in the tangle of rubble and filth and bodies left by the tsunami.

“Nobody ever saw him with the guns. He wasn’t even political. He never spoke about any sympathy with the Free Aceh Movement — nobody here dares to,” said one villager.

In a place riddled with informers, though, it was enough.

“On the Thursday evening, uniformed men in green berets came down through the village and told us we could collect a body on the hillside,” a villager said.

The villagers said the men identified themselves as members of the Combined Intelligence taskforce, which includes army, police and special forces.

A party of local men set off up the trail. But as they climbed the hillside, a volley of shots rang out and they ran back in fear. At dawn on Friday, the Muslim holy day, a smaller group went up again.

They found Zulfiadi’s body bruised, battered and shot several times. “We carried it down to his brother’s hut and held a religious ceremony,” said a villager.

After prayers, the men lifted the dead boy on their shoulders and took him on a long walk through the jungle to the Islamic cemetery where he was put in an unmarked grave.

His parents arrived from their village inland too late to see their son buried. That night, Zulfikar fled home with them.

One week earlier, the villagers had stumbled on the corpse of another man who they believed had been a victim of the death squads. Dody, 22, had survived the tsunami, but his younger sister drowned. The girl’s death had made him wild with anger, the villagers recalled. “He went around saying we had suffered enough and that if any of the soldiers tried to push him around for being mixed up with the Free Aceh Movement he’d hit them back,” said one.

Dody’s parents retrieved his bullet-riddled body and reconciled themselves to the loss of two children within three months.

According to Indonesian human rights activists, the tsunami did nothing to curb abuse by the security forces.

“It never stopped,” said Rutriyadi, of the Legal Aid Institute in Banda Aceh. “There’s no penalty for the military for abusing local people.”

The army denies using death squads and says that it does everything it can to minimise civilian casualties.

The rebels, fighting to win an independent Islamic state in the latest phase of a struggle that has lasted for decades, were hard hit by the Boxing Day disaster.

“The military had a very smart strategy on how to control Aceh after the tsunami,” said Taufan Damanik, who has won a British government scholarship for his work protecting children’s rights in Indonesia.

It had exploited American and Singaporean logistical help to gain control of new territory and started a sophisticated campaign of psychological warfare, he said.

The hardmen in the Indonesian military sense a change. They would like the UN and all the interfering foreigners to get out of Aceh as soon as possible.

That may be why the issue of Zulfiadi’s murder drew an uncertain response when it was brought up at a meeting of international aid officials in Banda Aceh last weekend.

According to a participant, the one thing on which they could all agree was that there must be no publicity about the boy’s death for fear of offending the Indonesians.

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