Bali nine executions: Meet the nine others on Indonesia’s death row
JOINING Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in the next, imminent round of execution by firing squad are nine others — four Indonesians and five foreigners. Paul Toohey asks: who are these death-row candidates and what are their crimes?
Martin Anderson, alias Belo, a Ghanaian national, has had it rougher than any of the others. He was sentenced to death by a Jakarta court in June 2004 for possessing 50 grams of heroin — worth, in current terms, about $2500. There have been no appeals on his behalf except by Amnesty. Ghana has no consular representation in Indonesia — its closest office is its high commission in Malaysia.
A Ghanaian consular officer in Malaysia said that to his knowledge, no Ghanaian official had visited Anderson in prison since his arrest 11 years ago. “We are still working on it,” he said. The officer said he had been approached by someone from Amnesty’s Indonesian office about Anderson last week. “But when he was arrested in 2004, it could be he may not be from Ghana,” said the officer. “It could be he is a person from another country using a false passport.”
President Francois Hollande has been active — but ineffective — on behalf of Serge Areski Atlaoui, 51, a French national and married father of four, who had his 2006 life sentence upgraded to death in 2007. Like all Indonesia’s death-row drug candidates, President Widodo rejected Atlaoui’s clemency appeal in January. He was convicted of running an ecstasy factory in the Banten Province of West Java. He has always pleaded his innocence.
The only woman on the list, Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso, 30, a Filipino migrant worker, has also spent the shortest time on death row. The Sleman District Court sentenced her to death in October 2010 for bringing 2.6kg of heroin into Jogjakarta from Malaysia earlier the same year. According to reports from Manila, President Benigno Aquino III did not raise Veloso’s case during President Joko Widodo’s just-concluded state visit to the Philippines, where both leaders agreed to strengthen efforts in the war on drugs. Veloso, who comes from a poor rural family, was a courier for a major international syndicate.
When Marco Archer was shot dead after midnight on July 18, in the first tranche of 2015 executions, it spelled disaster for Rodrigo Gularte, a fellow Brazilian national on death row. Gularte was sentenced to death in 2005 after being caught smuggling 19kg of heroin through the international airport in Banten province. Brazilian President Dilma Roussell recalled her ambassador to Indonesia after Archer’s death. He has since returned to Jakarta to continue what the Brazilian Embassy in Canberra says have been “dozens of efforts” on behalf of both men.
Three Indonesian men, Syofial (alias Iyen bin Azwar), Harun bin Ajis and Sargawi (alias Ali bin Sanusi), are the only people among the 11 who will die for non drug-related crimes. According to Amnesty International and other reports, they were sentenced to death in the Bangko District Court in November 2001 for the premeditated murder (accompanied by rape and theft) of seven family members of an indigenous Kubu tribe in Jambi Province, on the east coast of Sumatra.
The other Indonesian in the group, Zainal Abidin, from Palembang in south Sumatra, had his 2001 life sentence upgraded that same year to death for his role in smuggling 58.7kg of marijuana on the well-travelled Aceh-to-Java dope smuggling route. Indonesian authorities at the time of his arrest were cracking down on the marijuana trade, believing the proceeds from sales were being used to fund the Free Aceh Movement of north Sumatra.
Raheem Agbaje Salami, a Nigerian (who was initially wrongly said to have come from Spain) spent five years believing that he would one day be released. He had been sentenced, in 1999, to a life term by the Surabaya District Court in East Java for bringing 5.3kg of heroin through Surabaya airport. In 2006, however, the Supreme Court His upgraded his sentence to death. There has been little reporting of his approaching execution in mainstream Nigerian media, but Nigeria summoned Indonesia’s high commissioner to express “huge disappointment” after Indonesia wrongly said two Nigerians had been shot in the first round of executions in January. It turned out only one Nigerian, Daniel Enemuo, was executed.
http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/b...nesias-death-row/story-fnh81fz8-1227218463598
