It is coming up on the 21st anniversary of the devastating 2002 Bali bombing as the US Military Commissions plan pretrial hearings for Encep Nurjaman, the Indonesian militant accused of masterminding a crime that claimed the lives of 202 people, but who can’t be prosecuted in his own country.
Incarcerated at Cuba’s grim Guantanamo Bay detention facility since 2006, Nurjaman and fellow Malaysian militants Nazir bin Lep and Farik bin Amin were last in a Guantanamo courtroom in January, sharing evidence with their American defense lawyers via video link.
But in one of the endless delays over the past two decades, this time at the request of Bin Kep’s lawyer, the scheduled July 24-August 8 hearing was postponed until October without any clear explanation, though prosecutors say it isn’t unusual in a national-security case.
Ron Flesvig, spokesman for the US Military Commissions, said the delay was “consistent with the military judge’s responsibility to ensure proceedings are conducted in a fair and orderly manner without unnecessary delay or waste of time and resources.”
The three men are believed to be among at least 30 who remain at Guantanamo, down from 558 names whose Combatant Status Review had been reviewed over time. But how they were whittled down over the intervening period remains unclear.
It is now believed Nurjaman and the other two militants will finally go on trial in 2025, accused of the October 10, 2002, bombing of two Bali nightclubs and a suicide blast at Jakarta’s JW Marriott Hotel that claimed 11 other innocent victims the following year.
Who Hambali is
Better known by his alias Hambali but also Riduan Isamuddin and other noms de guerre, Nurjaman was captured by Thai and US intelligence agents at an apartment in the river town of Ayutthaya, northeast of Bangkok, on August 14, 2003, after being shadowed to a mosque by a foreign national acting as an uncover informant.
His Malaysian wife, Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, was caught with him in Ayutthaya but after serving a short time in jail she is believed to have gone back to Malaysia, where she was interrogated under the country’s Internal Security Act.
Nurjaman himself left Indonesia for Malaysia when he was 24 and only returned twice to his homeland in 1990 and 1995, both for short periods during the latter years of president Suharto’s rule.
After his capture, he reportedly spent three years at US Central Intelligence Agency black sites, initially – and only briefly – at the US wartime fighter base at Udon Thani in northern Thailand, the Thai Army 333’s headquarters that also previously housed the CIA’s wartime operations in Laos.
From there, he was moved to Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean base, and then on to a secretive prison in the Jordanian desert before finally becoming a permanent part of the Guantanamo population with other prisoners of the “war on terror.”
US charges
The Pentagon has approved eight non-capital charges of conspiracy, murder and terrorism against the three al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, but still appears to be making slow progress in getting around defense charges that Nurjaman was tortured.
A seventh charge was added in 2019 alleging Hambali conspired with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and 47 others to commit terrorist attacks across Southeast Asia and elsewhere, according to the file sheet. Among his co-conspirators was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the terrorist attack on the US of September 11, 2001.
The US has long since turned down an Indonesian request to hand over Hambali for trial, with former president George W Bush describing him as “one of the world’s most lethal terrorists.” As one senior police officer put it in 2010: “We’ll just have to accept we can’t bring Hambali back to be tried here.”
Human-rights groups say there is a wide difference of opinion among government officials over whether he should be tried in Indonesia, but one key witness, Bali bomber Ali Imron, who is serving a life sentence, has always maintained Hambali had no prior knowledge of the blasts.
Some enforcement sources believed at the time that it would be more trouble than it was worth, particularly as it would be difficult to prosecute Hambali under Indonesian laws.
In the United States, families of the 9/11 victims have seen has seen no retribution – or even justice. In August, the Office of Military Commissions disclosed that it was considering a plea deal to spare the lives of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four alleged accomplices in exchange for admissions of guilt.
Hambali was first accused of the Bali bombing in 2021, but that has never meant a speedy trial. Legal sources saw it as a mechanism to make his continued incarceration more palatable to human-rights groups and others uncomfortable with his current status.
It is widely believed the US has been reluctant to prosecute Hambali because he underwent torture at the hands of his captors, vividly described in the US Senate Select Committee’s 2014 report into the CIA’s secret rendition program.
Like others who were subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, he was allegedly waterboarded on numerous occasions at a time when it was deemed justified in an effort to extract actionable intelligence.
In June, in the first visit by a United Nations investigator since 2002, Irish law professor Fionnulu Ni Aolain found that conditions at the detention center were “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” although she agreed that minimum standards of compliance were being met.
“We need holistic torture rehabilitation, and that means really fixing ansd rebuilding the bounds of trust,” she said. “We also need these men to have access to their families in a regular way. They cannot recover from torture and they cannot be fully allowed to live their dignified lives if they don’t have regular access to their families.”