Singapore: Bali bomb maker Umar Patek has attempted to downplay his role in the 2002 terror attack, saying he wants to help Indonesian authorities reform other convicted terrorists.
Patek used a video interview with the head of the prison where he is jailed to speak of his desire to be released early. He has served only 11 years of a 20-year jail term, with a series of reductions in his sentence making him eligible for parole.
Umar Patek in the video filmed in jail in East Java.Credit:Lapassurabaya
His early release was approved last week by Indonesia’s counter-terrorism agency and by Detachment 88, the anti-terror police squad that receives training and funding from Australia. Only the signature of Indonesia’s Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Laoly is now needed to ensure his release.
The prospect of Patek having his prison time almost cut in half has upset and angered families and friends of victims of the nightclub bombings and prompted the Albanese government to make representations to Indonesia stating its opposition to the release.
Now in his 50s, Patek rejected interview requests, including from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, in a handwritten statement provided to the local corrections authority and distributed to media last week.
However, he has attempted to make his case to resume his life on the outside in a 20-minute video clip in which he answers questions posed by Jalu Yuswa Panjang, the governor of Porong prison, the jail where he is held, south of Surabaya in the Indonesian province of East Java.
Patek, whose real name is Hisyam bin Ali Zein, is filmed walking around the corrections complex with Panjang, who laughs along with the former Jemaah Islamiyah explosives guru known as Demolition Man.
Patek with prison governor Jalu Yuswa Panjang.Credit:Lapassurabaya
“Today I am together with my good friend from F Block,” said Panjang, introducing Patek in the video, which was released on the prison’s YouTube channel and marked “exclusive”.
“To those who don’t Umar Patek … perhaps many ladies out there who want to know, right?”
Patek and the prison boss also joke about him marrying “the local village sweetheart” in the Philippines in the 1990s when he was fighting with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the separatist militant group on southern Mindanao. His Filipino wife Ruqayyah binti Husein Luceno, who was granted Indonesian citizenship in 2019, lives near the jail.
“You were handsome. It was a long time ago, right?” said Panjang. “Perhaps something like a cover boy?”
Recounting his journey from his upbringing in Central Java to training in Afghanistan and figuring in Indonesia’s deadliest terrorist attack, Patek uses the video to play down his part in the bombings of the Sari Club and Paddy’s bar almost 20 years ago, as he did after he was captured in Pakistan in 2011.
Patek admitted at his trial to mixing the chemicals used in the explosives that tore through the nightspots in the heart of the Kuta tourist district, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians, but claimed he tried to convince the plotters to abandon their plan.
“When I went back to Indonesia [from the Philippines], my mistake was that I was involved in the Bali bombing,” he said in the video.
“The fact is when I got there [to Indonesia], the preparation works were already 95 per cent done. When I found out, I was directly opposing it. I told them I disagreed. But what could be done because things were ready 95 per cent? A 950kg [bomb] was ready, it was done. They insisted they carry it out.”
The aftermath of the bombing at the Sari Club on October 13, 2002. Credit:AP
Patek’s version of events was enough to spare him both the death penalty and life in jail, but he was found guilty of premeditated mass murder over the Bali attack, as well as bombings at churches in Jakarta on Christmas Eve in 2000 that left 19 people dead.
Ali Fauzi, the former Jemaah Islamiyah member who now runs a deradicalisation program and claims to have helped reform Patek, told the Herald and The Age last week he could guarantee that Patek would not return to a terror network.
In the jail video, Patek said he hoped to convince others not to turn to extremism.
“God willing, after I am released I want to help the government in the deradicalisation program for the people, especially the Millennials because Millennials are the ones who are easily [influenced] by the radicalism virus,” he said.
“So I want to help the government in educating the people on this topic including [talking] to terrorist convicts in prisons.”
Yasonna, the Indonesian law and human rights minister, told reporters last week that he was considering an objection to Patek’s early release, but said he was not referring to the message sent to Jakarta by the Australian government.
The minister said foreign governments could offer their suggestions, but that Jakarta only weighed up challenges “from our own institutions”.
– with Karuni Rompies
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