Fri 08 January 2021:
Abu Bakar Bashir a cleric linked to the deadly Bali bombings was freed from prison early on Friday, Indonesian authorities said
The preacher had completed an unrelated jail term for helping fund militant training in conservative Aceh province.
Authorities say he will enter a deradicalisation programme.
Eddy Hartono of Indonesia’s anti-terrorism agency said Bashir would now undergo a deradicalization program.
“We’re hoping Abu Bakar Bashir after he’s free can give peaceful, soothing preachings,” he said in a statement.
People from 21 nations died in the blasts on 12 October 2002 on the popular holiday island of Bali. The two bombs had ripped through Paddy’s Irish Bar and the nearby Sari Club in the Kuta tourist district.
“He was handed over to his family and a team of lawyers who came to pick him up at the penitentiary,” national prisons spokeswoman Rika Aprianti said.
Photographs showed him wearing a white robe, white cap and a face mask as he left the prison in Bogor, south of Jakarta.
“Abu Bakar Bashir was released from Gunung Sindur prison at 5.30 am,” spokeswoman Rika Aprianti told reporters, adding that he was healthy on his departure.
Bashir was expected to return to his home town of Solo city in Java later on Friday.
Zulkarnaen, a man believed to be one of the most senior members of JI and involved in making the bombs for the attacks, was arrested last month.
The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said Bashir’s release was “very distressing” to friends and families of the 88 Australians killed in the Bali bombings.
Morrison told reporters in Canberra the decision to release Bashir was “hard, it’s gut-wrenching” and Australia had always called for “tougher, proportionate and just sentences” for those involved in the attack.
“Decisions on sentencing … are matters for the Indonesian justice system and we have to respect the decisions they take … [but] that doesn’t make it any easier for any Australian to accept that,” the prime minister said.
Bashir’s lawyers had appealed for his release citing his age and risk of contracting Covid-19 in the south-east Asian nation’s notoriously overcrowded prison system.
Bashir has refused to renounce his extremist views in exchange for leniency.
Two years ago, plans to grant him early release on humanitarian grounds sparked a backlash at home and in Australia.
Abdul Rohim, Bashir’s son, told Reuters ahead of the release that his father would return to the Al Mukmin Islamic boarding school near Solo in Central Java province, which Bashir founded in the 1970s and whose graduates in the past have been linked to militant networks and attacks.
“He has completed his term. This is purely over,” Rohim said, adding that he would conduct Islamic preaching.
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