The Bali bombers can be shot dead at any time after Indonesia’s Supreme Court said on Monday an eleventh-hour appeal would not delay their executions.
Mukhlas, his younger brother Amrozi, and Imam Samudra could be marched into the forest and shot by firing squads as soon as Tuesday, despite lawyers’ attempts to win a reprieve.
The bombers had exhausted all their legal options and the latest appeal “will not change or delay the execution,” Supreme Court judge Djoko Sarwoko said.
Earlier today, the Denpasar District Court received yet another appeal from the bombers’ lawyers and sent it to the Supreme Court for a decision.
It was always going to be a long shot. The Attorney General’s Office has repeatedly said all avenues for appeal were exhausted long ago.
Execution sites have been prepared on Nusakambangan Island, where the bombers’ prison is located, local chief prosecutor Muhammad Yamin said on Monday.
The convicted terrorists would be “executed simultaneously” but at different locations, he said.
Indonesian authorities have assembled a crack squad of Indonesian soldiers from which the firing squads will be drawn.
Helicopters are waiting on Nusakambangan, off the southern coast of Central Java, waiting to fly the bombers’ bodies to their home villages for burial.
And strong young men in Tenggulun in East Java and in Lopang Gede in West Java are waiting for the order to dig graves for the villages’ infamous sons.
Nusakambangan prison chief Bambang Winahyo said the bombers appeared calm and ready to die, in line with their repeated assertions that they were looking forward to becoming “martyrs” for jihad.
“They’re in good condition, healthy. It seems they’re facing this calmly,” he told AFP.
Earlier on Monday, the bombers’ families and lawyers descended on the nearby port of Cilacap, hoping to convince authorities to grant them a final visit.
But authorities at the port, which provides access to Nusakambangan, locked the access gate in their faces.
Ali Fauzi, the younger brother of Mukhlas and Amrozi, said he’d hoped to pass on a message from their mother, who wanted her condemned sons “to be patient, to be sincere and to accept their fate”.
“But she also said that if I can bring them home alive and free, then I should bring them home,” he added, laughing. He’d earlier said he did not believe the men would be spared.
Fauzi also cited a letter, written by Mukhlas and passed on during a visit some weeks ago, in which he asked his family for forgiveness.
“The message was ‘please forgive me from head to toe – if we are not destined to meet (before execution), hopefully in the hereafter we shall meet’,” Fauzi quoted the letter as saying.
Lulu Jamaludin, Samudra’s younger brother, said he had brought food for the bombers in the hope of seeing them again, but that was not to be.
The three bombers spent Monday reading the Koran and fasting, the Indonesian newspaper Suara Merdeka reported, quoting a prison source.
“All these days they are reading the Koran,” the prison source said, adding that the bombers had been locked in the main part of their isolation cells and denied access to their tiny exercise areas.
“Before the isolation they were allowed to breathe some fresh air while exercising in open space, now they cannot.”
There was a rare expression of remorse today for the carnage the three men caused when they bombed two Bali nightclubs on October 12, 2002, killing 202 people including 88 Australians.
But it did not come from the bombers themselves, and the remorse was limited to the Indonesians who suffered.
“We apologise on behalf of the family to the Bali people especially, and for the Indonesian people in general, that after all this time, especially Amrozi, Ali Ghufron (aka Mukhlas) and Imam Samudra made a mistake,” said Ja’far Shoddiq, another brother to Amrozi and Mukhlas.
“… we cannot do anything (but say sorry) if the Balinese people and the Indonesian people felt they were hurt by Amrozi and his friends.”
The bombers have never expressed any remorse for the Australian and other Western victims of the attacks, but have previously expressed regret for the 68 Indonesians who died.
Shoddiq, who spoke to reporters after Monday’ss appeal was lodged, said the condemned men were not aware that another court challenge was underway.
Lawyer Imam Asmara Hadi said the fresh appeal rested on the bombers’ claim that they had not been properly informed of the rejection of their most recent failed appeal.
“We have lodged an appeal because we haven’t received a copy of the Supreme Court rejection of our previous appeal,” Hadi said.
