Ba'asyir likely to escape if convicted

Ba'asyir likely to escape if convicted

Ahmad Pathoni, Agence France-Presse/Jakarta

Cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, accused of leading a regional militant group blamed for deadly bombings, is likely once again to escape a tough sentence even if he is found guilty at the end of his second terrorism trial on Thursday.

Prosecutors have struggled to prove that Ba'asyir, by virtue of his alleged leadership of the Al-Qaeda-linked Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) group, was involved in the 2002 Bali bombings and another attack on the Jakarta Marriott hotel the following year.

But few see the case they put forward as convincing.

Prosecutors have already dropped the main charge, which could theoretically carry the death penalty, that Ba'asyir and his supporters planned the bombings.

Instead they sought an eight-year sentence -- arguing he had failed, as head of the organization, to prevent JI militants from carrying out terror attacks.

Judges are not bound by the prosecutors' recommendation. Even if they convict him, any sentence is thought unlikely to be longer than eight years in view of what analysts see as a flimsy case.

"They have a very weak case against him," said Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group (ICG).

"It would have been a difficult case for any prosecutor to have to prove in a court of law that a connection took place between giving a lecture in 2000 and a bombing three years later," Jones told AFP, referring to the Marriott bombing in 2003 which killed 12 people.

Prosecutors in their indictment said that as JI chief, Ba'asyir visited one of its training camps in the Philippines in 2000 and allegedly relayed a "ruling from Osama bin Laden which permitted attacks and killings of Americans and their allies".

Several camp alumni later went on to conduct terrorist acts, the indictment said.

Muslim scholar and political analyst Azyumardi Azra believed the prosecutors "have failed to prove Abu Bakar Ba'asyir's role in the Marriott and Bali bombings".

Ba'asyir's lawyers said they were confident judges would acquit him.

"We are very optimistic that the judges will exonerate him because there's no evidence whatsoever to back up the prosecutors' case," said Wirawan Adnan.

"If that does not happen, it must be because of intervention from the government," he said.

Ba'asyir, 66, has maintained that U.S. President George W. Bush, "the enemy of Allah", has pressured Indonesia to jail him to stop him campaigning for Islamic law.

Frederick Burks, a former U.S. State Department translator, testified in Ba'asyir's trial in January that in 2002, a Bush envoy had asked then-president Megawati Soekarnoputri to arrest Ba'asyir and hand him over to U.S. authorities.

Jones believed it was very unlikely the new government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would interfere in Ba'asyir's case.

"This trial should not be seen as the test of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government on terrorism. All of the material was complied by prosecutors before he took office and the last thing his government would do is to intervene," she said.

Azyumardi said that in the post-Megawati era, "there seems to be no strong pressure from foreign governments on Indonesia to influence the court's decision. This, perhaps, is due to (Susilo's) more decisive attitude in dealing with sensitive issues".

Ba'asyir was arrested a week after the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people, and went on trial in April the following year.

Prosecutors failed to prove that he waged a terror campaign to topple the government and led JI but judges found him guilty of immigration offenses.

Police rearrested him in April last year as he left prison after serving the immigration sentence, citing new evidence of terror links and of his JI leadership.

The network has been blamed for a series of terror attacks in the region, including a suicide bombing outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta last September that killed 11 people.