By Michael Bachelard
JAKARTA: The Bali bomb-maker Umar Patek has been sentenced to 20 years' jail for his role in the deaths of 202 people in the Bali bombing, including 88 Australians.
He will spend the next 19 years in custody after the court took into consideration the year he has been in jail since his arrest.
Wants a family ... Patek.Credit: Getty Images
Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment after dropping their call for the death penalty.
After taking all day to review the evidence and read his judgment, chief judge Encep Yuliardi said late last night in the West Jakarta District Court that Patek was "legally and convincingly" guilty of all five charges including premeditated mass murder.
The other charges were of possessing weapons and smuggling weapons, ammunition and explosive materials into Indonesia, providing assistance to an act of terrorism by hiding information about a terrorist act, forging documents and possessing explosive materials.
Patek, 45, claimed during the trial that he should be found not guilty of all except document forgery. He confided in an interview with the Herald during that trial that he wanted a short sentence of less than 10 years because he was about to turn 46 and wanted children before it was too late.
He was the last of the Bali bombers to face trial in Indonesia. One, Hambali, has not been tried, but is in prison in Guantanamo Bay over his links to al-Qaeda.
The final day of the trial was conducted under massive security, with 243 police officers deployed at the courthouse including snipers and a platoon of the Australian-funded anti-terrorist police, Densus 88.
Patek, known in Indonesia as the Demolition Man, was for many years south-east Asia's most wanted man, with a $US1 million bounty on his head.
Patek said in his defence that he only learnt after arriving at the resort island in the weeks leading up to the 2002 bombing that Westerners were to be the target.
One of the plotters, Imam Samudra, told him the bombs were designed to kill "bule", white foreigners, only after he arrived at the rented house where the bombs were being made.
The reason he was given for the bombings was "revenge for what happened to Muslims in Palestine". But Patek told the five judges that he had tried to convince a number of his co-conspirators not to go ahead with the plot, saying they should be attacking Jews in Palestine if they wanted revenge.
Patek had a long career in Islamist terrorism, having fought in the Philippines and been trained in bomb-making in Afghanistan.
He fled Indonesia shortly after the Bali bombings and was on the run for nine years before being caught in the Pakistan town of Abbottabad just four months before Osama Bin Laden was killed there by US forces.
with Karuni Rompies