Jakarta - Indonesia's Supreme Court has rejected the final appeal of one of three Islamic militants sentenced to death for bombing two nightclubs on the resort island of Bali in 2002, killing 202 people, a local report said Friday. A three-judge panel hearing a judicial review brought by the defence team of Amrozi, 43, one of the key bombers, rejected the appeal on August 30, according to the detik.com online news service.
The court rarely announces its verdicts, but one member of the panel, Judge Djoko Sarwoko, confirmed that they rejected the defence team's constitutional challenge of an anti-terrorism law under which Amrozi was convicted.
"The decision on the request for a judicial review has been taken, and ... it was denied," he was quoted as saying.
Amrozi and fellow militants Imam Samudra and Ali Gufron aka "Muklas" masterminded and carried out the twin attacks against Western tourists on Bali in October 2002, killing more than 150 foreigners including 88 Australians.
The three men, alleged to be members of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a regional terrorist network responsible for several bombings across Indonesia in recent years, were sentenced to death by Bali's Denpasar District Court.
None showed remorse for their actions, especially Amrozi, who was dubbed "the smiling bomber" for his broad grins during police interrogations.
The Bali bombing shook the Indonesian government out of its denial that it had a home-grown terrorist problem with militants inspired by Osama bin Laden. Within weeks after the attack - the worst at that time since the September 11 attacks in the US - Indonesia's parliament passed tough anti-terror legislation that was later used to convict the bombers.
Amrozi's defence team, in a final bid to save his life, challenged the conviction in the Supreme Court, noting that Indonesia's Constitutional Court had said it was unconstitutional to convict someone using a retroactive law.
But the Constitutional Court's ruling neither squashed the convictions nor death sentences handed down to the three men, or dozens of other militants who were convicted of playing roles in the attacks under the anti-terrorism law.
"Such evidence does not negate the Bali verdicts," Sarwoko was quoted as saying. "The safeguarding rules about protecting the defendant's human rights were in accordance with the principles of Justice."
The Supreme Court is expected to also rule soon on judicial reviews filed by Samudra and Gufron's defence teams.
JI is blamed for several simultaneous church bombings across Indonesia on Christmas Eve 2000; bombings on Bali in 2002 and 2005; the JW Marriott in Jakarta in 2004 and the entrance to the Australian Embassy in 2005.
Indonesian police have arrested around 400 militants since 2002, severely damaging JI's ability to operate.
