Heru Andriyanto & NYT – The National Police have named him as the figurehead of an Al Qaeda-style terrorist network in Aceh and prosecutors accused him of mobilizing people to conduct acts of terror, but a lawyer for radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir has a different description of his client to offer – a kitten.
Commenting shortly after prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty for Bashir, the cleric's lawyer, Mahendradatta, lambasted prosecutors, saying that the case against Bashir was based on flimsy evidence.
Mahendradatta said his client was being persecuted just to please the United States.
"Everybody knows that Ustad is just a kitten. He is no tiger," the lawyer said, referring to Bashir by an honorific term used for highly-regarded Islamic preachers and elders.
"He's just an ordinary guy who voices anti-American sentiments. But he really does not have the power to execute much of what he says."
Police handed Bashir to prosecutors on Dec. 13 on charges of leading and financing the paramilitary training activities in Aceh of a group of suspected militants who were the target of a series of raids early last year.
The Aceh camp was allegedly planning a Mumbai-style attack on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and state guests during the Independence Day ceremony at the State Palace last August.
Mahendradatta accused prosecutors of deliberately delaying the cleric's trial in order to keep him detained. "He's already getting old. Why do they have to detain him? This is proof that their true purpose is to keep Ustad silent," Mahendradatta said.
Police have failed in the past to pin terrorism charges on Bashir and analysts say it is crucial they back up the charges this time, or risk turning Bashir into even more of a martyr.
Prosecutor Andi Muhammad Taufiq said on Wednesday that the charges against Bashir, whose detention term had been set to expire next Thursday, had been registered with the South Jakarta District Court.
Andi said the firebrand cleric had been charged with breaching Articles 7, 9, 11, 13, 14 and 15 of the Anti-Terror Law, and that Bashir's detention was now the responsibility of the district court.
"The maximum punishment is death," he said, adding that the prosecution had prepared as many as 138 witnesses to testify against Bashir.
Police have previously said that the Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid, an organization Bashir founded and leads, financed and organized a secret extremist group dubbed "Al Qaeda in Aceh." The group stockpiled weapons and carried out training in Aceh's jungle-covered mountains in February last year.
Islamist militants have been accused during the past year of armed robberies and a number of attacks on the police.
Subsequent crackdowns saw scores of terrorism suspects arrested or killed, including Dulmatin, one of Southeast Asia's most wanted terrorism suspects.
Sidney Jones, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said unlike in earlier cases, the Indonesian authorities appeared to have a strong enough case to guarantee a heavy sentence against Bashir.
"I think they do have a strong case, and I don't think this is an unusual time period," Jones said. "Because in the Aceh cases, some of those guys were arrested in February and their trials didn't start for another six months."
The case is the third legal attempt in less than a decade by the Indonesian authorities against Bashir, a founder of the radical Jemaah Islamiyah movement. The group has been blamed for a series of attacks, including the 2002 bombing of nightclubs on Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners.