Indonesia’s Death Row Convicts Facing Mass Execution

Indonesia’s Death
Row Convicts Facing
Mass Execution
Here are the 10 people facing execution by firing
squad in Indonesia for drug-related offenses . One
of them, Serge Atlaoui of France, was given a last-
minute, two-week reprieve pending another review
of his case. APRIL 25, 2015
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Mary Jane Veloso, 30,
Philippines
Mary Jane Veloso left school after seventh grade and was
married by the time she was 16. A few years later, her
husband left her with two children and no financial
support.
“We were so poor,” Ms. Veloso’s older sister, Marites
Laurente, recalled of their time growing up. “We were just
picking up bottles and plastic in the road to sell to make
money.”
In April 2010, according to Ms. Veloso’s family, a labor
recruiter who lived nearby told her she could find work as
a maid in Malaysia, a well paying job with no education
required. Ms. Veloso put a few garments into the only
luggage her family had – a child’s backpack – and boarded
a flight to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, with the
recruiter.
There, according to her father and sister, Ms. Veloso was
told that the original job had been canceled, but that there
was a similar job available in Indonesia. The recruiter took
her out shopping for clothes and bought her a new
suitcase.
“When she lifted the bag, it was heavy,” Ms. Laurente said.
“My sister said she had a bad feeling about it, but when
she opened the bag it was empty.”
The recruiter flew back to the Philippines, the family said,
and Ms. Veloso boarded a flight for the Indonesian city of
Yogyakarta, where she expected her new employer to meet
her at the airport. Instead, she was met by Indonesian
officials, who discovered more than five pounds of heroin
hidden inside the lining of the suitcase.
Prosecutors claim that Ms. Veloso was a willing courier,
according to local media reports.
Ms. Veloso was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Ms.
Laurente said her sister, who spoke no Indonesian and very
little English, was unable to understand what was taking
place during the trial, being assisted by a young translator
whose English was also very limited.
The Philippine government has flown Ms. Veloso’s family
members to Jakarta twice to visit her in prison.
“The guards and the other people there in the prison are so
kind,” Ms. Laurente said. “They love my sister so much.
They are trying to make her happy. They are taking good
care of her. She is fat now like me.”
Ms. Veloso’s relatives live in a cluster of wooden houses
along a dirt path off the main road near the town of
Cabanatuan, about 60 miles north of Manila. Her sons, now
6 and 12, are cared for by their grandparents.
“They are always asking, when is momma coming back?”
Ms. Laurente said. “We tell him that she will come home
in a year. We can’t tell them the truth.”
— Floyd Whaley
Suryo Wibowo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Myuran Sukumaran, 34,
Australia
Myuran Sukumaran was arrested on his 24th birthday on
the Indonesian island of Bali, where he and a fellow
Australian, Andrew Chan, were found to have been the
ringleaders in a plot to smuggle several pounds of heroin
out of the country.
When he looks back on that time now, he thinks “how
stupid I was back then,” he said in a recent television
interview.
The quick payoff was the lure. “I was hoping to buy a car,”
he said. “I was hoping to start a business.”
In Kerobakan prison, Mr. Sukumaran has said in
interviews, he found a sense of purpose that he lacked
before. He developed an interest in painting, and he
contacted the Australian painter Ben Quilty, who soon
became a friend and mentor.
Mr. Quilty considers the convict a gifted artist.
“Because Myuran has been incarcerated and on death row,
there’s been a real need for him to be introspective, to turn
the mirror on himself metaphorically and physically,” Mr.
Quilty said.
Mr. Quilty and other supporters of Mr. Sukumaran, who
has become a cause célèbre in Australia, say he helped
create an art studio in the prison and organize courses for
inmates in art and other subjects.
“Hundreds of inmates have benefited from his work,” said
Tina Bailey, a pastor with the Cooperative Baptist
Fellowship, based in Bali. “He has the respect of the
guards, the inmates and the prison authorities for all the
work he has done.”
His younger brother, Chinthu Sukumaran, said in an
interview that Myuran “was never really a bad person.”
“He wanted to be successful,” he said. “He was childish and
selfish, but it was only that. Nothing more.”
— Michelle Innis
Bagus Othman/Reuters
CRIME: POSSESSION OF HEROIN
Martin Anderson, 50, Nigeria
Martin Anderson was arrested in Jakarta in 2003 on a
charge of possessing about 1.8 ounces of heroin and was
accused of being part of a local drug ring. He had traveled
to Indonesia on a fake Ghanaian passport and has been
incorrectly identified as Ghanaian.
He was sentenced to death in 2004.
According to his lawyer, Kusmanto, who like many
Indonesians uses one name, Mr. Anderson was shot in the
leg during his arrest — a method the Indonesian police are
sometimes known to use when apprehending a suspect —
and remains bothered by the wound to this day.
He has been in poor spirits since being transferred to
Nusakambangan Island for execution, Mr. Kusmanto said.
Mr. Anderson has filed for a judicial review of his
conviction and death sentence with the Supreme Court, but
his lawyer said he feared the court would not consider the
appeal until after he is executed.
Such appeals can take six months to be heard, Mr.
Kusmanto said. “Obviously we hope it’s sooner.”
— Joe Cochrane
Darren Whiteside/Reuters
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Okwudili Oyatanze, 41, Nigeria
The YouTube clip shows what seems to be a typical Sunday
religious service at a small church. A young African man,
accompanied by an Asian guitarist, sings a heartfelt gospel
song as the audience sings along.
But the camera does not show the security guards, iron
bars and barbed wire fences that would have indicated this
was no ordinary place. The singer, Okwudili Oyatanze, was
giving his regular performance at a penitentiary outside the
Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Known in Indonesia’s penal system as “The Death Row
Gospel Singer,” Mr. Oyatanze, 41, was arrested in 2001
while trying to smuggle 5.5 pounds of heroin through
Jakarta’s international airport, in his stomach, after
arriving on a flight from Pakistan. He was convicted the
following year and sentenced to death.
Mr. Oyatanze has made the most of his incarceration,
writing more than 70 songs and recording multiple albums
behind bars. He has performed with prison guards as well
as fellow inmates.
In the video, shot in 2008, Mr. Oyatanze sang his song “God
You Know,” which was also the name of an album he
released that year.
“He has turned his life around in jail,” said the Rev.
Charles Burrows, a Catholic priest from Ireland who now
lives in Indonesia and is offering religious counseling to
Mr. Oyatanze as he awaits his execution.
Raised in Biafra, a strifetorn state in southeastern Nigeria,
Mr. Oyatanze started a garment business in 1999, traveling
to Indonesia to buy clothing and resell it in Nigeria. The
business collapsed, and Mr. Oyatanze, heavily in debt,
traveled to Pakistan to try to revive it, at the suggestion of
a fellow Nigerian living there.
The plan involved swallowing capsules of heroin before
boarding a flight to Jakarta. “There was a chance to earn
some easy money, so he became a courier,” Mr. Burrows
said.
— Joe Cochrane
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Andrew Chan, 31, Australia
Andrew Chan’s older brother, Michael, believes his sibling’s
wrong turns may have begun when Michael left home at
18, leaving Andrew without a role model. Their parents,
striving Chinese immigrants, worked long hours seven days
a week in the family’s Chinese restaurant.
Andrew began to get into mischief at about 13 or 14,
Michael said, and dropped out of high school at 16.
“He drifted and started to experiment with drugs, and he
found himself in that culture that led him to offend,” said
Michael O’Connell, a lawyer on Andrew’s defense team.
In 2005, Mr. Chan and eight other Australians were
arrested on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, some of
them at an airport with heroin strapped to their bodies. An
Indonesian court found Mr. Chan and Myuran Sukumaran
to have been the ringleaders in a plan to smuggle the drugs
out of the country.
He does not deny his crime.
“The only thing I can do is apologize,” he said in a 2006
television interview. “It makes me want to become a better
person today. When you are young, you think you are
invincible.”
He and his supporters say he has long since reformed. He
converted to Christianity while in prison and became a
counselor to other inmates. This year, he was ordained as a
minister .
“Being incarcerated makes you take a long, hard look at
yourself,” said Christie Buckingham, an Australian pastor
who helped supervise Mr. Chan’s religious training.
“Both boys have done that,” she said of Mr. Chan and Mr.
Sukumaran. “They needed role models when their parents
were not present.”
“Every human being has a desire to belong,” she said.
“Andrew went in the wrong direction. Anyone can do that.”
Michael Chan says he has no doubt Andrew thinks about
that decision every day.
“It is what it is,” he said. “But I believe he is sorry. He
knows it has not just jeopardized his life, but had an
impact on everyone.”
— Michelle Innis
Made Nagi/European Pressphoto Agency
CRIME: SMUGGLING COCAINE
Rodrigo Gularte, 42, Brazil
Rodrigo Gularte, an avid surfer from Brazil, was arrested in
2004 trying to smuggle 13 pounds of cocaine into Indonesia,
hidden in several surfboards. He was tried in a courtroom
outside Jakarta and sentenced to death in 2005.
His lawyers say he never should have been in a courtroom
at all. Doctors in both Indonesia and Brazil have certified
that he suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Indonesia’s criminal code forbids the prosecution of people
with mental illness, requiring instead that they be sent to a
mental health center.
Mr. Gularte’s current attorneys, who have represented him
only since March, say they have no idea who their client’s
previous lawyer was or whether his mental illness was ever
brought up at trial.
“He was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of 16,” said
Ricky Gunawan, who is leading Mr. Gularte’s defense team.
“From what we know, his lawyer never appeared at his
trial hearing, and he was given the death penalty.”
Mr. Gularte’s lawyers say his drug abuse as a younger man
was a mask for his deeper problems. They and Mr.
Gularte’s family have released Brazilian medical records
dating back more than 20 years, as well as evaluations by
Indonesian doctors after his 2004 arrest, supporting their
contention that he is mentally ill.
But the office of Indonesia’s attorney general, which
recently sought a second opinion from police psychiatrists,
says he is mentally fit. Prosecutors, however, have neither
released that new psychiatric evaluation nor shared it with
Mr. Gularte’s legal team.
A Brazilian government official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the
case publicly, said Mr. Gularte does not understand the
gravity of his situation.
“He does not think he’s going to die,” the official said,
adding that “on many occasions he stated that he refuses to
leave the prison, something that can probably be attributed
to his paranoia.”
In a meeting with psychiatrists in March, according to
Brazilian news reports, Mr. Gularte spoke of ghosts and
mentioned a fear of electromagnetic waves from satellites
watching him from above.
Mr. Gularte’s cousin Angelita Muxfeldt, who has been
visiting him twice a week in prison, called the ordeal
“emotionally difficult.”
— Joe Cochrane and Vinod Sreeharsha
Reuters
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Jamiu Owolabi Abashin, 50,
Nigeria
Jamiu Owolabi Abashin was living on the streets of
Bangkok in 1998 when a fellow African living there took
pity on him and brought him home. Shortly thereafter,
according to Mr. Abashin, his new friend asked whether he
wanted a quick-paying job, in which he would get $400 for
bringing a package of clothing to the friend’s wife in
Surabaya, Indonesia, where she sold used shirts and pants.
Mr. Abashin readily agreed, but soon wished he hadn’t:
The package contained nearly 12 pounds of heroin, and he
was arrested after landing at Surabaya’s airport. Mr.
Abashin, who was traveling on a false Spanish passport,
contended he was duped.
He was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison,
which was reduced to 20 years on appeal. State prosecutors
challenged the sentence reduction before the Indonesian
Supreme Court, which in 2006 sentenced Mr. Abashin to
death.
In a request for presidential clemency in 2008, he admitted
knowingly smuggling the drugs. The request was denied in
January.
The Indonesian government refers to him as Raheem
Agbaje Salami, the name on the fake Spanish passport he
was using when he was arrested.
Ursa Supit, an Indonesian legal activist who is advocating
on Mr. Abashin’s behalf, says that because he had no
money, he was assigned a state lawyer for his trial and had
no legal counsel when he appealed to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Abashin, who now has a lawyer, is challenging Mr.
Joko’s rejection of his clemency request.
“He has been inside now for 17 years, and he has never
broken a rule inside,” Ms. Supit said. “And now they are
going to execute him. He’s never had money for lawyers.
It’s not fair.”
— Joe Cochrane
CRIME: MARIJUANA POSSESSION WITH INTENT TO DISTRIBUTE
Zainal Abidin, 50, Indonesia
Zainal Abidin was at his modest home in Palembang, in
South Sumatra Province, in December 2000 when two
friends knocked on his door asking for a place to stay for
the night. They were carrying several large burlap sacks
that Mr. Zainal, according to his lawyer, believed to contain
rice.
Hours later, after the police raided his home in the middle
of the night, his lawyer said, he found out that the sacks
were stuffed with 129 pounds of marijuana.
The police had arrested one of the visitors, Aldo bin Hasan
Umar, who had left the house after midnight and tried to
sell a small quantity of the marijuana on the streets.
Mr. Umar told the police that Mr. Zainal was the ringleader
of a plan to sell the marijuana. In 2001, Mr. Zainal was
convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Later that
year, the South Sumatra High Court overturned the
sentence and gave him the death penalty.
During his trial, his lawyers argued that Mr. Zainal, a
laborer at a local furniture factory, could not afford to buy
such a large quantity of marijuana, but the judges rejected
the claims that Mr. Zainal was not involved.
Mr. Umar was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and a third
man convicted in connection with the case was given four
years. Both were eventually granted parole and today are
free, while Mr. Zainal faces the firing squad.
“He was fingered for being the owner of the house where
the sacks were found, but it was his friends who brought
them there,” said Ade Yuliawan, Mr. Zainal’s current
lawyer. “His punishment should not have been more
severe than what the actual drug dealers received.”
Mr. Ade also said the legal process against his client was
flawed because the Supreme Court did not respond to Mr.
Zainal’s 2005 request for a judicial review of his conviction
and death sentence until this past January, 10 years after
he filed it. Mr. Ade said the court told him that the filing
did not follow proper procedures.
— Joe Cochrane
Zainal Abidin
CRIME: SMUGGLING HEROIN
Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, 47,
Nigeria
Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise’s story, as his wife tells it, is
similar to those of other Nigerians on Indonesia’s death row
for drug trafficking. Unemployed in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest
city, he was lured to Pakistan by fellow Nigerians on the
promise of a job with good wages.
But once in Pakistan, instead of a job, he got an offer to
swallow some capsules – filled with goat horn powder, his
wife, Fatimah Farwin, says he was told – and fly to
Indonesia.
“They said they didn’t want to pay tax on it,” Ms. Fatimah
said. “When he arrived at the airport in Jakarta, the police
saw him – I don’t know how – they caught him and X-
rayed him, and they found it and it was drugs.”
Arrested in 2001, Mr. Nwolise was convicted the following
year of bringing 2.6 pounds of heroin into the country, and
was sentenced to death.
During his trial, according to Ms. Fatimah, Mr. Nwolise had
no translator, and his Indonesian lawyer could barely
communicate with him. She said that a judge, through an
intermediary, offered to sentence him to prison rather than
death if he paid a bribe of 200 million rupiah, worth about
$22,000 at the time.
“But he was just a poor courier. He didn’t have any
money,” Ms. Fatimah said.
Ms. Fatimah, who is Indonesian, met Mr. Nwolise in prison
in 2007, when she was accompanying a friend who was
visiting another inmate. The two married later that year;
they have since had two children, now 5 and 3, but she has
not brought them to see him since they were infants. She
has told them that their father is working in an office in
another country.
In January, the Indonesian police accused Mr. Nwolise of
running a drug syndicate from prison. No charges were
brought, but Ms. Fatimah, who says emphatically that her
husband is innocent of the accusation, believes it resulted
in his being placed in the group of inmates now facing
imminent execution.
“Some woman on the outside blamed him,” Ms. Fatimah
said, referring to a police informant, “but when they came
to his cell, they never found anything – never, never, never.
He never had a trial and next thing, they wanted to execute
him.”
— Joe Cochrane
Metro Tv, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Temporary Reprieve
CRIME: RUNNING A NARCOTICS FACTORY
Serge Atlaoui, 51, France
Serge Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 during a police raid on
a factory outside Jakarta that was producing the drug
ecstasy. According to Mr. Atlaoui, a welder by trade, he had
moved to Indonesia from the Netherlands with the
understanding that he would be working on machinery in
an acrylics factory.
"He was never informed of the actual use of the machines,
otherwise, as a married man and father of three children at
the time, he wasn't going to take the risk of going to
Indonesia," said his lawyer, Richard Sédillot.
Mr. Atlaoui was sentenced to death in 2007.
His case has drawn considerable attention in France, where
news outlets have said that he would be the first
Frenchman subjected to capital punishment since France
abolished it in 1981.
France has been pressing Indonesia to spare him; on
Thursday, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius wrote in a letter
to his Indonesian counterpart that “serious dysfunction” in
the country’s legal system had denied Mr. Atlaoui his
rights. On Saturday, Mr. Atlaoui got an unexpected reprieve
pending another review of his case in a state court.
Mr. Atlaoui’s wife, Sabine, said that her husband had been
mischaracterized in court as a leader of the drug ring. She
said he had noticed soon after starting the job that there
was suspicious activity at the factory, but that he had never
taken part in manufacturing drugs. He tried to get out of
the situation as soon as he could, but he was arrested
before he could do so, she said.
"Overnight, we found ourselves in a nightmare," she said.
"I told myself, this can't be reality, it isn't possible for this
kind of thing to happen."
The couple married in 2007, after Mr. Atlaoui had been
imprisoned but before he had been sentenced to death.
They have since had one child, who is now 3 years old;
they have three other children from previous marriages, all
now in their 20s.
"When we are together, we give each other a lot of energy,
strength and courage," Mrs. Atlaoui said. "We give hope to
each other, even if the situation is critical.”
She said she had never doubted her husband's innocence.
"He is an honest, respectful and very generous man," she
said.
— Aurelien Breeden