Indonesian cleric who inspired extremists freed from prison

JAKARTA, Indonesia —  A convicted firebrand cleric who inspired the Bali bombers and other violent extremists walked free from an Indonesian prison Friday after completing his sentence for funding the training of Islamic militants.

Police said they would continue to monitor the activities of Abu Bakar Bashir, who is 82 and ailing, and his son said Bashir for now would be avoiding activities outside his family because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bashir was imprisoned in 2011 for his links to a militant training camp in the religiously conservative Aceh province. He was convicted of funding the military-style camp to train Islamic militants and sentenced to 15 years in jail.

The cleric has accumulated 55 months of sentence reductions, which are often granted to prisoners on major holidays, such as Independence Day, and for religious holiday exemptions and illness, said Rika Aprianti, the spokeswoman for the corrections department at the Justice Ministry.

“He is released as his sentence ends and expires,” Aprianti said, adding that her ministry had close cooperation with the national police’s counter-terrorism squad and the National Counter-terrorism Agency to provide security during the cleric’s release.

Bashir, wearing a white robe and mask, was escorted by members of police’s elite anti-terrorism squad, known as Densus 88, when he was led into a waiting car outside the Gunung Sindur prison in West Java’s Bogor town at dawn Friday, Bashir’s son Abdul Rohim, told the Associated Press.

He said that the family, a team of Bashir’s lawyers and a medical team accompanied the cleric, who returned to his home in Central Java’s Solo city, about 295 miles east of the capital, Jakarta, just after he walked free from prison. An ambulance was also following the entourage.

National police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan said the police would continue to monitor Bashir’s activities.

“I just want to [keep] my father from crowds during the coronavirus pandemic,” Abdul Rohim said. “He would only rest and gather with his family until the outbreak ends, there will be no other activities ... for sure.”

The slender, white-bearded Bashir, an Indonesian of Yemeni descent, was the spiritual leader of the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah network behind the 2002 bombings on the tourist island of Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, including 88 Australians, leaving a deep scar on that country.

Facing pressure to imprison Bashir, Indonesian authorities struggled to prove his involvement in the Bali bombings and fought multiple battles to uphold convictions on other charges. Prosecutors were unable to prove a string of terrorism-related allegations, a treason conviction was overturned and a sentence for a document forgery conviction was considered light.

Upon release from prison in 2004, he was arrested and again charged with heading Jemaah Islamiyah as well as giving his blessing to the Bali bombings. A court cleared him of heading Jemaah Islamiyah but sentenced him to 30 months for conspiracy in the Bali bombings.

After his release in 2006, he resumed teaching at Al Mukmin school in his hometown, Solo, and traveled the country giving fiery sermons.

Al Mukmin, the Islamic boarding school he founded with Abdullah Sungkar in 1972, became a militant production line under Bashir’s influence, radicalizing a generation of students. Many of them would later terrorize Indonesia with bombings and attacks that aimed to bring about an Islamic caliphate and battered the country’s reputation for tolerance.

In speeches, Bashir said Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and three militants sentenced to death for the Bali bombings were not terrorists but “soldiers in Allah’s army.”

A court banned Jemaah Islamiyah in 2008, and the group was weakened by a sustained crackdown on militants by Indonesia’s counter-terrorism police with U.S. and Australian support.

The 2010 raid on the camp that Bashir helped fund was a crushing blow to radical networks in Indonesia and forced changes in the mission of Islamic extremists. Instead of targeting Western people and symbols, the militants focused on Indonesians who were deemed “infidels,” such as police, anti-terrorism squads, lawmakers and others who were seen as obstacles to transforming the secular country into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. More recently, the militants have been inspired by Islamic State extremists’ attacks abroad.

Bashir was transferred from isolation on a prison island to the Gunung Sindur facility in 2016 for age and health reasons and has been in the hospital several times because of his deteriorating health.

President Joko Widodo almost granted a request for Bashir’s early release in 2019 on humanitarian grounds but reversed himself after protests from the Australian government as well as from relatives of the Bali bombing victims.