3 Bali Bombers executed

[PvN73]

The three Bali bombers on death row have been executed by firing squad.
Imam Samudra and brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas were shot to death by separate firing squads at 12.15am Indonesian time, an Indonesian Government spokesman has confirmed.

The executions come six years after the Kuta nightclub explosions that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Family members of the bombers were informed of the execution by Ali Fauzi, the brother of Mukhlas and Amrozi.
Ali Fauzi headed to the prison island of Nusakambangan by boat about 5.30am Sydney time to oversee the religious rights on the bodies.

He sent a text message to relatives in Arabic saying "they are with the Almighty''.
A source in the prison told Agence France-Presse they shouted "Allahu Akbar'' ("God is great") as they were escorted out of their isolation cells by paramilitary police just before their executions.

In a statement on behalf of the family of Mukhlas and Amrozi, elder brother Chozin said: "We hope the spirit of my brothers Amrozi and Ali Ghufron (Mukhlas) will be taken by green birds to paradise."
The bullets will be removed from the bodies and autopsies performed before the bodies are cleaned and wrapped in traditional Muslim cloth in preparartion for burial.

The men's bodies are expected to be flown by helicopter today from the prison island to their home towns.
Amrozi and Mukhlas are from the small village Tenggulun in East Java. Imam Samudra comes from Serang in West Java.
The bombers' funerals are expected to be held within hours of their bodies arriving home.

More here - http://www.theage.com.au/world/bali-...1109-5ko7.html

[duster]

Good. Fucking. Riddance.

[Armcast]

Three down, so many others to go...

[Jazbabee]

Too bad they wasted 6 years feeding, clothing and housing these sacks of shit glad they are outta here

[Guest]

Just saw this on the news! Glad to hear it!!

[JimC]

Thanks, P.

Soak them in swine blood; then send them home; I say.

[PvN73]

I am just hoping that those insane people do not cause anymore problems, though there is a high travel alert not to go to Bali for the moment. Eeekkk fingers crossed they do not do anything, but with our close proximity to Indonesia it is worrisome

[Ivy]

Speaking of the alerts and warnings: Did you see the insane people at Sydney airport, boarding their flight for Bali, saying "Nothing's going to ruin my holiday!" Ummm... if you end up dead, it might put a bit of a damper on it.

[michihunt]

Sure they're with the almighty...the almighty DEVIL!!! Wish I could put a little piece of bacon in their mouths as they are shipped home.

[PvN73]

Speaking of the alerts and warnings: Did you see the insane people at Sydney airport, boarding their flight for Bali, saying "Nothing's going to ruin my holiday!" Ummm... if you end up dead, it might put a bit of a damper on it.

GET OUT! Really, yeah well another bomb will put a damper on your holidays tiger!

I swear they have no respect for people's lives other than their own. Scary stuff

[Scarsguardianstalkr]

Too bad they wasted 6 years feeding, clothing and housing these sacks of shit glad they are outta here

dont worry from what i hear they wouldnt have spent much




i cant believe that its 4pm and im only just hearing about this if it wasnt for this forum i wouldnt get any news

[Ivy]

Deluded to the end
November 10, 2008
Article from: The Australian

BEHIND their backs, they were known as Huey, Dewey and Louie, or, in Indonesian, the "quack-quack trio", after the Disney comic book characters.

But in the closed world and shut-down minds of the criminals responsible for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, there lay scant room for such amusement.

Not even in the taunting grin of Amrozi bin Nurhasyim - the smiling baby of the gang, whose early attempts at social disturbance went little further than defecating on the graves of ancestors in his east Java village of Tenggulun - could there be said to be any real joy.

Literalists to the end, by necessity incapable of drawing nuance in conversation, or of tracing the fall of light and shade in life, the three mass-murderers gloated over their horrifying achievement at every opportunity, gesticulating and hurling obscenities at any foreign audience they could summon.

The death toll of their endeavour was bewildering, then and now: it is baldly restated to every passer-by at the giant stone memorial erected on Jalan Legian, the pulsing thoroughfare in the heart of Bali's tourist district.

Two hundred and two dead in the terrible inferno, 88 of them Australian holiday-makers; 38 Indonesians, many of whom were Muslims, the rest mostly Balinese Hindus.

Now Amrozi, his older brother Ali Gufron bin Nurhasyim, also known as Mukhlas, and Abdul Azis, better known by the self-bestowed faux religious title Imam Samudra ("preacher of the oceans"), have finally been dispatched.

Each was taken to a secluded spot on the heavily guarded prison island of Nusakambangan in southern Java early yesterday and, at 12.15am (4.15am Australian eastern summer time), shot by a firing squad of 12 paramilitary police armed with high-powered rifles, led by two senior officers.

They were secured to wooden posts 5m apart. Nine clerics were on hand to offer whatever solace they could give to the condemned men.

They reportedly shouted "God is great", before being shot by members of the elite Brimob police brigade.

In the original Donald Duck tales, by adventure's end the trouble-prone nephews usually end up on the right side of the law.

And in their own twisted ways, Amrozi and co, as they are generally described in more mainstream Indonesian news reporting, were hoping to also wind up seated at their God's right hand.

They thought they were on some kind of spiritual quest, insisting afterwards that Australia was a particular target in their attacks for its mistreatment of Muslims in the US-led war on terror.

Except that support for their cause within Indonesia was entirely illusory: symptomatic, it could be said, of the sort of delusional mindset that planned and carried out the Bali atrocities in the first place.

Even in the home village of the two brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas, there remains bewilderment at the impact they have had on Indonesia's standing in the world, and in Australia's eyes.

"I feel some sadness," Abu Sholeh, the head of Tenggulun - population 2500 - where the brothers grew up and were buried, tells The Australian.

"Because they are my citizens. But hopefully it will never happen here again; hopefully it is only Amrozi who does (this kind of thing)."

Although the Muslim boarding school established by older brother Djafar Sodiq still operates in the village, most of its students are from elsewhere in Indonesia, not Tenggulun, according to Abu Sholeh. His people are not hardliners, he insists.

If the trio had any kind of afterlife experience on their prison island in the early hours of yesterday, it would have proved a disappointment, contrary to whatever had been proposed by the ramblings of preachers such as the hate-filled Abu Bakar Bashir as he gingered them up for their fates.

Bashir, a co-founder of the Jemaah Islamiah movement which produced and nurtured Amrozi, Mukhlas and Samudra as well as a host of other misfits whose prime motivation was essentially a religious xenophobia, has long engaged in the sort of resentful pedagogy that keeps grudges ticking over.

He established the al-Mukmin boarding school in the central Java city of Solo where so many of the Bali bombers were educated, including Amrozi and several of his brothers.

Bashir remains implacable in his insistence the only lives worth valuing are Muslim ones, although his fiery theological bluster has more lately masked a savage power struggle within his own former organisation, the Indonesian Mujaheddin Council, which sidelined him in recent internal elections.

The elderly Yemeni-descended cleric promptly announced the formation of a new religious lobby group, the grandly titled Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (Supporters of Monotheism), which he seems to hope will siphon off the hardcore of the MMI, itself often merely a front for the grander pan-Islamic aspirations of Jemaah Islamiah.

But despite the almost overwhelmingly Muslim nature of much of Indonesian society, and the shrill calls of agitators such as Bashir, what support there may have been for the bombers' position, even among the hardliners, seems to be waning.

Even Hasan al-Jufri, from the usually strident Muslim Defenders Front (FPI), was dismissive of the trio's fate in a recent conversation with The Australian.

"I absolutely have no objection (to their executions)," the Jakarta-based activist said days before the executions. "They confused jihad with terror. What they engaged in was terror, not jihad. Jihad is part of our faith; if we are attacked, only then can we return the attack with all our energy."

Thoughtful Muslims - of whom the faith's Indonesian cohort are overwhelmingly in the majority - are apt to state the prophet Mohammed's famous warning, after the devastating battle of Badr was over, that "now the real battle is ahead of us".

The essential challenge of Islam, in other words, was to gain control over one's inner desires, not to subdue one's enemies.

"Islam is a religion of peace. If you talk about jihad, it has to be part of faith; in conditions of peace, it is not permissible to do what (the Bali bombers) have done," the FPI's Jufri says.

Jufri is far from moderate. His group's leader, Rizieq Shihab, was in recent days sentenced to 18 months' jail for planning a violent attack on a religious tolerance rally inJakarta.

But he claims he will not be encouraging his followers to become involved in the morbid circus accruing around the burials of Amrozi, Mukhlas and Samudra. "No. The FPI is not going to do that," he says.

However the dog whistle blows long and sharp - a lesson Bashir learned during his years of exile in Malaysia during the 1980s and '90s, evading the tentacles of former dictator Suharto's police state - and there has already been a growing caravan of followers to see off the men they regard as heroes.

Many of Jufri's members were among them. That's just one reason many observers believe the three terrorists should have had their death sentences commuted to life in prison, with no access to the outside world and therefore no ability to further influence other potential psychopaths.

"We're worried that there are still many Amrozis to come, regardless of whether this one is executed; what is the Government doing to prevent this happening?" Balinese man I Ketut Triono asked during a recent nationally televised public forum.

There are other arguments, too. Indonesian intelligence expert Wawan Purwanto believes more could still have been learned by pumping the trio for information.

"It would have been better to keep them alive for the value of the intelligence they can provide on terrorist networks," Purwanto says.

"Ninety per cent of the information they have has already been obtained; the 10 per cent could still be extracted."

Ali Imron, the younger brother of Amrozi and Mukhlas, presents a good example of Purwanto's argument.

Having been sentenced to life imprisonment, he has since been given a long leash by anti-terrorism police and is regularly let out of jail.

There was predictable outrage when Ali Imron was invited, during the holy month of Ramadan last year, to a fast-breaking ceremony with other convicted terrorists.

However Indonesian authorities argue the benefit they gain from having people such as Ali Imron on side - as well as the incredibly articulate Nasir Abas, a reformed ex-JI cell leader and Amrozi's brother-in-law - far outweighs the impact of any public disappointment at their strategy.

And the police have made about 300 arrests since the first Bali bombings, many of them on the basis of information gathered from fellow JI members, to prove their case.

Criminal law analyst Teuku Nasrullah also believes the executions should have been put off beyond this week, though he argues the primacy of law to make his point.

"In the case of the death sentence, any ongoing legal efforts should force a delay in the execution," the Indonesia University academic says; perhaps a moot point, since the Supreme Court had already indicated it would dismiss a new appeal lodged by Jafar Sodiq in Denpasar on Monday.

But despite an apparently conclusive declaration from Indonesian Attorney-General Hendarman Supandji last month that "all legal issues have now been dealt with" in the matter of the convictions and that the executions could therefore be carried out, things were never not in fact so clear-cut.

Prominent authorities on Indonesian law, including Melbourne University's Tim Lindsey, have spoken and written urgently about the lack of transparency in the bombers' convictions under retroactive anti-terrorism legislation.

[Ivy]

Indonesia's Constitutional Court ruled in 2004 that the new law should not have been used in convicting any of the Bali bombers, since it was passed after the atrocity: just six days afterwards, in fact, with then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri keen to show her tough-on-terror credentials.

Most analysts agree that the country's existing criminal code should have been used instead, and would almost certainly have produced the same outcome, except with a far better result for perceptions of Indonesian rule of law and the country's reformasi process, which is barely 10 years old and often shaky at the best of times.

And in the case of the three Australians on death row in Bali's Kerobokan jail - heroin smugglers Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and Scott Rush - transparency in Indonesia's justice system trades at a premium.

Yesterday's executions may have closed a traumatic chapter in Indonesia's history, but a rushed-through and flawed prosecution of Amrozi and co hardly bodes well for the future of the three young Australians anxiously awaiting their own fates in Bali.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-28737,00.html

[Albertadude]

The real shocking thing here is that millions and millions of Indonesian muslims see these guys as heroes....

Folks, the Bali bombers are the logical conclusion to the islamic worldview...it is brutal and murderous to its core.....simply read the Mein Kampf of Islam, the Quran and Hadiths and clue into the fact we are in a major war whether we like it or not...

Good riddance to these murderous scumbags but there is millions and millions of radical muslims to replace them..

And all the moral relativising and political correctness and multiculturism is not going to change that reality....

I do wonder if the Western societies are up for this battle or will we go quietly into the night under a brutal system???

Western Europe looks horrific right now...and we are not exempt here in North America either...

We live in exciting yet incredibly dangerous times to be sure!

[Mrs Tingles]

I'm so glad they are dead, but i worry that they are considered martyrs by those other nut jobs. I agree with you PvN73 that people shouldn't go to Bali. The reaction to the deaths are scary, and do think there will be another attack soon. I hope they rot in hell, but i had some kind of retributive justice knowing that Amrozi (the bastard who grinned through all of this) was shitting himself before the execution. I don't normally speak like this or get so angry, but they killed so many Australians!

On a happier note, this pic made me laugh. Amrozi doing a Zoolander.

[michihunt]

A guy from my town was at the nightclub the night it exploded. He left behind a 2 year old son and pretty wife. His dad was on the news last night crying.
CBS 7 Exclusive Interview: 2002 Bali Bombings Victim's Father Speaks 11/11/08


CBS 7 Staff
November 11, 2008

A Midland man talks about how it feels to know his son's killers have been executed.

October 12, 2002, Jake Young learned that his 34-year-old son, also called Jake, had been killed in a terrorist attack on a popular nightspot in Bali, along with another 220 people.

Jake graduated Lee High School in 1986. He went on to be an All-American center at Nebraska, and graduated from law school there. Jake Young had become a corporate lawyer with an international firm in Hong Kong.

Bali authorities arrested several terrorists, and three of them were executed by firing squad last week.

Jake young says he's not gloating over the executions, but it helps.

“I’m glad justice was done. It does provide another sense of closure.”

Jake's son is now in second grade. His mother Laura is a pediatric nurse practitioner. They live near her family in Kansas City.

Jake is still concerned for their safety. Nothing has ever happened, but he can't shake the feeling of being afraid for them.