Jakarta. The bodies of the eight men killed by the firing squad on Wednesday have not all been buried yet, but already the Attorney General’s Office is preparing for another round of executions.
Tony Spontana, a spokesman for the AGO, said in Jakarta on Wednesday night that his office was “waiting for the evaluation” of the most recent round of executions before it could set a date for the next one.
The administration of President Joko Widodo has executed 14 people so far this year, 12 of them foreign nationals, and all convicted of drug offenses. The administration insists that the country faces some kind of “drug emergency,” although experts have repeatedly debunked the figures it cites for drug-related deaths.
The third round of executions, though, will not feature drug convicts, Tony said. Instead, the AGO has identified five convicted murderers who will be in the next batch to face the firing squad.
They include Tan Joni, also known as Aseng, who was convicted in 2006 of the murder of three people, one of them a 6-year-old girl; and Gunawan Santoso, convicted in 2003 for ordering a hit on his father-in-law and the latter’s bodyguard, an off-duty Special Forces officer.
The other three are Syofial, a.k.a. Iyen bin Azwar; Harun bin Ajis; and Sargawi, a.k.a. Ali bin Sanusi. They were convicted in 2000 of hacking to death seven members of an indigenous tribe in Merangin district in Sumatra’s Jambi province.
Tony said all five men had exhausted their avenues of appeal and would be the next to be put to death.
The announcement came hours after the AGO oversaw the execution of eight men, seven of them foreign nationals, on the prison island of Nusakambangan, off Central Java, in the early hours of Wednesday.
They were Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran; Rodrigo Gularte, a Brazilian diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia; Raheem Agbaje Salami, Martin Anderson, Sylvester Obiekwe Nwolise and Okwudili Oyatanze of Nigeria; and Indonesian national Zainal Abidin.
