Bali bombers to seek Muslim edict on validity of penalty

THREE Islamic militants on death row for the 2002 Bali bombings met their families yesterday as their lawyer said they would seek an edict from Indonesia's Muslim body on the legality of execution by shooting.The three - Imam Samudra, Amrozi and Mukhlas - could face possibly a firing squad within a month unless they seek presidential clemency, an option which they have already ruled out.Last week, prosecutors handed over copies of a Supreme Court verdict rejecting the men's final appeal, marking the start of a 30-day deadline for them to request clemency or be executed.The three men were sentenced to death for their role in two nightclub blasts on Bali's Kuta strip on October 12, 2002, in which 202 people died, mostly foreign tourists.

The attacks were blamed on the South-East Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiah.Samudra's mother, wife and four children visited the men in prison on Nusakambangan island, off the southern coast of Java.Samudra's family travelled with the relatives of Amrozi and Mukhlas, accompanied by one of the men's lawyers, Achmad Michdan.Mr Michdan said the defence team was adamant in its rejection of the Supreme Court verdict on the grounds that the case review did not involve a retrial and re-examination of witnesses."We want the panel of judges who heard the case to be investigated, " Mr Michdan said.He said the Bali bombers' lawyers would lodge a request for the Supreme Court to hear the appeal case again.

The lawyers would also send a letter to the Indonesian Council of Ulema, the country's highest authority on Islam, asking it to issue a fatwa on the legality of execution by shooting.The three convicts have asked to be beheaded, rather than killed by firing squad.Previously, the bombers said in a statement read out by their lawyers, that if they were executed, their blood would "become the light for the faithful ones and burning hellfire for the infidels and hypocrites".

Comments

child sex workers in Bandung

A policeman, right, watches over two masseuses and their customers during a raid on suspected prostitution activities at a hotel in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province The Bandung authority is at loss to uncover cases of covert prostitution involving junior and senior high school students, whose number continues to rise in the West Java capital. Eli, a sex worker advocacy program mentor from the Rumah Cemara Group in Bandung, said it was hard to provide advocacy to teenagers involved in covert prostitution since most were not receptive. The number of those involved in covert prostitution is believed to be higher compared to commercial sex on the streets, she added. Eli has been providing support to more than 200 housewives and child sex workers over the past two years, around 20 of who are senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 16. "They are psychologically unstable at those ages. They are hard to handle due to their strong motivation to ea

Bricklaying in Aceh

Refleksi: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6 Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while. It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the winners o

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog