Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two detainee conspirators in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a US military tribunal assembled in the Gulf Guantanamo to discuss it. proposal.
The detainees, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes for conspiring with an al Qaeda affiliate to carry out the attack. The bombings killed 202 people from 22 nations.
“No God of any religion rewards such acts of horror,” said Solomon Lamagni-Miller, 18, from London. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother.
Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, to the bombing and other “global terrorist activities” left him with contempt for “over 20 percent of the world’s population, Muslims. I’m a religious person and the hate-filled person I’ve become is definitely not what I wanted.’
Echoing the sentiment of many family members, he appealed to the jury “to deal with these killers in such a way that they cannot do to others what they did to us”.
For hours this week, the victims’ fathers, mothers, a brother and three sisters offered harrowing accounts of searches for missing relatives, life-changing burns and the void left by the deaths of young people who had been on holiday in Bali and did not did he ever come home
Two of Mr Bin Amin’s older brothers tearfully pleaded with the jury for leniency. Both defendants subsequently disavowed their terrorist pasts, apologized to the families and said they were tortured while in the CIA’s secret overseas prison network from 2003 to 2006.
The men were arrested in Thailand in June 2003. A US military court is hearing the case to decide a sentence of 20 to 25 years and cannot grant credit for time served. There is, however, a secondary, secret deal in which the men could return to Malaysia later this year.
Mr. Bin Amin’s siblings flew in from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, and sat in the public section of the spectators’ gallery, where a blue curtain separated relatives of the dead from the United States, Britain and Germany.
The older brother, Fadil, 62, an architect who studied in Birmingham, England, told the court sadly that his mother taught all 10 of her children a peaceful form of Islam. “He was kind of misguided” and made bad choices, she said.
Sitting in the gallery was Matthew Arnold, who traveled to Guantanamo from his home in Birmingham and testified that his brother Timothy, 43, was in Bali for a rugby tournament when he was killed “by this atrocity”.
“My family’s lives have been completely changed by the actions of the perpetrators of this crime,” he said. “And I would like the court and Mr. Bin Amin and Mr. Bin Lep to know the devastating consequences of their actions on so many innocent and decent people.”
Mr. Bin Amin, who hung his head at the defense table throughout the testimony, apologized to the victims, his family and “all Muslims. That’s not what I was taught as a child,” he said.
In his two decades of detention in the US, he said: “I have changed. I’m not an angry young man anymore. I am a reformed man. My faith has evolved.”
As part of their plea agreement, both men offered secret testimony earlier this week at the upcoming war crimes trial of Encep Nurjaman, a detainee known as Hambali who prosecutors portray as the mastermind of terrorist attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003 But both men said in their confessions that they had no first-hand knowledge of Mr. Hambali’s role in the attack.
On Thursday, Mr. Bin Amin went further.
“I didn’t know anything about the Bali bombing until after it happened,” he said, describing his role in the plot as helping some of the perpetrators after the bombing and helping with money transfers that could be used for other attacks.
He showed drawings he made of himself being tortured, which were recently declassified to show the jury.
Col. George C. Kraehe, the prosecutor in the case, did not object to the artwork showing Mr. Bin Amin naked, hooded, bound in painful positions and at one point held eagle-eyed in a plastic tarp by masked guards, one spilling water in his nose and mouth.
Christine A. Funk, a lawyer for Mr. Bin Amin, said the display of the artwork was to help the jury “weigh the appropriate punishment.”
Mr Bin Lep said he did not want the legacy of torture “to define who I am”.
Also, he said, “I forgive the people who tortured me.”
He admitted his crimes. “I am guilty of my role in the Bali bombing,” he said.
He described himself as “young, immature and stubborn” when he was dragged into Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 to train with al Qaeda.
“All I wish for now is peace,” he said. “I wish that peace to everyone here, but especially to the victims and their families.”
