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Indonesian officials announced they will soon execute the three Islamic
militants convicted for the 2002 terrorist bombings on the tourist
island of Bali that killed 202 people. VOA's Nancy-Amelia Collins in
Jakarta has more.
The spokesman for the attorney general's
office, Jasman Panjaitan, told reporters Friday all legal matters
pertaining to the executions have now been completed.
He says the execution will take place in early November, but did not give an exact date.
Jasman
said the three men will be executed at Nusakambangan island, the
maximum security prison island just off central Java where the three
men are being held.
Most executions in Indonesia are not announced and are carried out late at night by a firing squad.
Imam
Samudra, Amrozi Nurhasyim, and Ali Ghufron were sentenced to death five
years ago for planning and carrying out the 2002 suicide bombings on
two night clubs in Bali that left 202 people dead, many of them foreign
tourists.
The three men belong to the Southeast Asian terrorist
group Jemaah Islamiyah, which is also blamed for the 2003 Marriot Hotel
bombing in Jakarta, the 2004 bombing outside the Australian embassy in
Jakarta, and a second terrorist attack in Bali in 2005.
The
authorities have arrested more than 300 Islamic militants linked to
Jemaah Islamiyah over the past few years and most experts agree the
group has been decimated and is no longer capable of carrying out large
scale attacks.
But security expert and author on the terrorist
group, Ken Conboy, says there are still small networks of Islamic
radicals who could carry out revenge attacks, as vowed by the Bali
bombers, after the executions take place.
"There's a whole
network of hard-line radicals that have easy access to explosives…and
let's face it - vest bombs and pipe bombs are not very sophisticated
and certainly within their ability, so the technology's there and the
new materials are out there, so it's not that tough to do," he said.
Earlier
this week police say they foiled a plot by militants to bomb a fuel
depot in Jakarta and arrested five suspects, but they did not elaborate
further or say whether the plan was related to the Bali bombers'
impending execution.
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