Executed Bali Islamic terrorists praised as martyrs, to inspire 1001 jehadis in Indonesia

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‘1001 jihadis to take place of Bali bombers’

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Tenggulun, East Java | November 11, 2008
Article from:  The Australian
THE delighted family and spiritual adviser of executed Bali bombers Amrozi and Mukhlas have hailed their martyrdom, claiming the brothers died with smiles on their faces and that there will be 1001 jihadis to take their place.

Abdul Rohim, son of Muslim preacher Abu Bakar Bashir who set the bombers on their path of mass murder, said he had examined the pair’s faces after they were shot by firing squads early on Sunday.

“They were smiling, and the perfume of the bodies was not from the soap used to clean them; it was an extraordinary perfume,” Mr Rohim told The Australian.

Mr Rohim warned that the executions could now unleash 1001 jihadis.

“The Government thinks that by executing them it can stop the jihad,” Mr Rohim said.

“But the point is that this will not extinguish the jihad.

“It’s not possible to extinguish the light of Allah. The jihad will always continue.” The boasts came as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Australia continued to receive credible threats of attacks after Sunday’s execution of the terrorists.

“Regrettably, we continue to receive credible information that Bali remains an attractive target for terrorist activity,” Mr Smith told parliament.

However, the Foreign Minister said there had been no change to the threat level cited in Australian Government travel advice.

It remained at the second-highest level – “reconsider your need to travel” – the level it has been pegged at since the attack on October 12, 2002, in which 202 people, 88 of them Australians, were killed.

The statement came as recently installed Bali Governor I Made Mangku Pastika – the former local police chief who headed the investigation into the terrorist atrocity – warned against violent retaliation for the executions.

Indonesian authorities also revealed they continued to be at a high level of alert after several bomb threats over the past week, including on Australia’s Jakarta embassy.

“I hope the people will regard (the executions) as a normal thing, and not react excessively,” Mr Pastika said.

He attempted to pour cold water on the claims of holiness being made by the families of Imam Samudra and the bin Nurhasyim brothers.

Hundreds of supporters briefly clashed with police as the bodies of Mukhlas and Amrozi – the latter dubbed the “smiling assassin” for his courtroom antics – arrived by helicopter at their village of Tenggulun, in east Java, on Sunday.

Bashir, who responded to the two brothers’ final wishes by praying over their bodies shortly before they were interred had yesterday morning resumed his schedule of preaching jihad in Muslim boarding schools across Indonesia.

Bashir, the co-founder of Jemaah Islamiah, was jailed on a conspiracy charge related to the bombings before being released in 2006.

Female members of the family visited the brothers’ grave site to tidy up and pray, having been denied access to the area during Sunday’s burial ceremony according to strict Muslim funeral rules. Yasyrifah binti Nurhasyim, the sister aged in between Amrozi – who was 46, and Mukhlas, who was 48 – was praying at the graves with her daughter, Aulia Sahida.

A defiant Yasyrifah said the family was proud of her brothers’ “achievement”. “We’re relieved, because they’ve become martyrs,” she said.

She added that the graves, which are set apart from the main cemetery in Tenggulun village, would be kept simple.

“A fence will be put around the graves,” she said. “But no sort of shrine will be built. We’re worried it could become an altar (for ancestor worship).”

Muslim leaders in Java often struggle with trying to keep the faithful from following the older syncretic aspects of the religion that are holdovers from a pre-Islamic past in Indonesia – such as ancestor worship.

Family and hardline followers such as Abdul Rohim were busy yesterday offering interpretations of the arrival of three large birds of prey over Tenggulun village on Sunday, moments before the bodies of Amrozi and Mukhlas arrived. The birds wheeled high in the air for several minutes and then separated, two flying in one direction and the third flying separately in another.

Followers are interpreting this as a sign that the brothers and their co-conspirator, Imam Samudra, were taken straight to heaven after their deaths.

Bali bomber feels ‘beautiful’ facing end: Showed no remorse for killings of 202

Bali bomber feels ‘beautiful’ facing end: Showed no remorse for killings
Lindsay Murdoch in Jakarta
January 5, 2008

ONE of the Bali bombers has written from his Indonesian jail that he feels so “beautiful” on the eve of his execution that “no words can describe how good the feeling is”.

Mukhlas, the elder brother of the so-called smiling assassin Amrozi, posted a 10-page statement on the internet exhorting Muslims to show their support for him by turning out in mass numbers for his burial.

An Islamic militant’s website is carrying the statement, fuelling fears the execution of the three bombers could ignite violence and arouse public sympathy for their cause in the world’s biggest Muslim nation.

The controversial Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir warned last month of a “big disaster” in Indonesia if the executions were carried out. He made the comments after visiting the bombers in jail. But the Jakarta security expert Sidney Jones says that while the executions are likely to generate anger and retaliation against Indonesian government installations or personnel, “careful security arrangements should be able to prevent any incident”.

Mukhlas, a father of six who is also known as Ali Gufron, titled his jail writings The Right And Good Dreams.

“Please read my writing,” he urged Muslims in the internet statement, which he called his “last will and testament”.

“I would not trade how I am feeling now with anything else in the world,” he said. Mukhlas claimed that Amrozi and the third bomber, Imam Samudra, are also writing books in their cells in a high-security jail on Nusakambangan Island, off Central Java.

A former Islamic preacher in his late 40s, Mukhlas has showed no remorse for helping to organise the 2002 bombings in Bali’s Kuta tourist district, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. Many of the victims were Muslims. He claimed on the internet he has sympathy “from all Muslims in the world” for what he did as well as the “blessings of God”. Earlier, the three bombers said in a signed statement smuggled from jail that their deaths would make them heroes to God and that being “thrown out of the country” would be “an adventure” and “a sightseeing trip”.

“If we are executed, then our drops of blood that flow – with God’s permission – will become light for those good Muslims and will become hell burning fire for those who are not Muslims and the hypocrites,” they wrote.

A countdown for the bombers to face a firing squad has begun after prosecutors visited the bombers on Wednesday and told them they had 30 days to lodge an application for clemency or the executions would be carried out. Lawyers for the men will seek final instructions when they go to the jail, expected within days. But the bombers have said repeatedly they will not seek clemency from the President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who would be highly unlikely to grant it for extremists who carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Indonesia’s history.

Ms Jones, of the International Crisis Group, said fears of more terrorist attacks in Indonesia had fallen and the risk of more Bali-style bombings was low.

“Most extremist groups here have concluded that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are counterproductive but they have not given up on local targets, even if their capacity to go after them is weak,” she wrote in The Jakarta Post.

The militant group Jemaah Islamiah “is trying to sterilise and consolidate its ranks” after the arrest of a number of its leaders this year, Ms Jones said. Other militant groups were “reaching out to disgruntled members of other organisations and new groups are emerging and recruiting members, particularly in Java”.

Ms Jones said the biggest danger to Indonesia “lies not in terrorism, separatism, election disputes or any external threat but in poorly managed communal tensions that have the potential to fray this country’s social fabric”.

Indonesia executes three Muslim Bali bombers who killed 202 people

Indonesia executes three Bali bombers
DPA  | Sunday, 09 November, 2008

Jakarta: Indonesia early Sunday executed three Muslim militants convicted for their roles in the 2002 bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners, media reports said

Imam Samudra, 38 and brothers Amrozi, 46, and Ali Ghufron, alias Mukhlas, 48, were executed simultaneously by firing squads shortly after midnight on Saturday, Jasman Panjaitan, spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office said.

Landslides and floods in Java kill 101

The execution took place on Nusakambangan Island off the southern coast of Java where the men were being held, the TvOne channel said, citing an anonymous source.

The Detik.com online news service reported from the port town of Cilacap near Nusakambangan island that the bodies of the three men were brought to nearby clinic for autopsy after they were confirmed dead by doctors supervising the execution.

The report quoted an unnamed source as saying the bodies would be flown in by helicopter to the mens’ hometowns for burial.

The three convicts have been on death row since 2003, when a Bali court sentenced them to death for their roles in the bombing of nightclubs in tourist Kuta district.

None of the bombers has shown any remorse for the attacks.

In the hometowns of the Ghufrons in east Java district of Lamongan, as well as at Samudra’s residence in west Java’s Serang district town, dozens of their supporters shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great), witnesses said.

Hours before the execution, Ali Fauzi – the Ghufrons’ brother, arrived on Nusakambangan to take care of his brothers’ bodies.

Indonesian authorities repeatedly postponed plans to execute the three while their attorneys filed repeated legal appeals, including demands for a judicial review in a bid to delay their execution.

The three were members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a regional terrorist network responsible for several bombings across Indonesia.

These included simultaneous church bombings on Christmas Eve 2000, bombings on Bali in 2002 and 2005, the bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2004 and an attack on the Australian embassy in 2005.

Bali bomber feels ‘beautiful’ facing end: Showed no remorse for killings