VOA常速英语:Indonesia Says Bali Bombers to be Executed Next Month

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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.